Florencia Sosa Rey –

Artist’s reflections

“how to reappropriate folklore through abstraction? dance without dancing?
create rhythms without instruments? “ – Florencia in conversation with Camila

February 2025

Following this visit to the Herencia Latina dance school in Sherbrooke, I made contact with Ana Lucia, a folk dance teacher in Montreal who specifically teaches Argentine folk dances. Folklore is a hybrid, a result of the migration of Inca people to the south of the continent and northern Argentina and their encounter with colonial populations. I approach folklore as an experimental terrain to think about hybrid identity. Chacarera, zamba, and cueca are some of the dances taught to a small group of amateur participants – most of the others absent, travelling to their southern motherlands. It’s what we used to do with my family, when I was younger. I recognize the musical rhythms and some of the gestures, as they have been part of my sound and artistic landscape since childhood. The dynamics of these dances are based on courtship, mostly gendered male-female, and are performed in pairs of two or four. My attention goes towards the movements of the body, the accessories, and the movements on the floor. Hand clapping rhythms, pañuelos in hand, circles, zapateo. I observe, pencil and paper in hand. Intuitively, these elements become notes, concise scribbles, lines, and quick strokes. The resulting drawings are pragmatic, with both graphic and abstract shapes. They are the beginnings of notations; of a certain embodiment of the translation from folk dance to abstraction.