Fabiola Santana
I was born to a displaced Angolan and a white Portuguese father who grew up under a dictatorship. I inhabit a space between ethnicity and culture. I have inherited traumas that have shaped who I am and made me question my identity. Seeking to understand the potential for community building and collective healing through performance, my work places participants at its epicentre. I am interested in how we can develop mutual trust through intimate & vulnerable shared encounters. I live and work in Liverpool, UK.
“What makes Fabiola’s work so distinctive is that it delves into difficult, sensitive, and often private issues, and does so with huge sensitivity and humanness. Her work is beautiful and also brave and intimate; it places care at its big heart” Alice Booth, Lancaster Arts
Fabiola has been developing a workshop project through Divergency:
Mothers, Grandmothers and Their (post)colonial Children
A workshop series I delivered to 5 international female artists as part of the Live Art Development Agency’s DIY programme, in partnership with Museum of London. Divergency’s seed commission gave me a crucial opportunity to begin devising the material, and then road test the workshop with other Divergency members. Their feedback contributed to the creation of a workshop I am really proud of, and I feel I have grown as a facilitator. I lead work with the body, home, memory, ritual, voice, text & song. To facilitate a held and safe environment, I devised the work collaboratively with a female counsellor of Caribbean heritage. We created a space to come together with the themes as our communality, allowing ourselves to be challenged and vulnerable. We sought out the potential for new networks of transformation and collective healing.