My artistic practice is a continual exploration of the body—its potential, poetics, and political dimensions amid ecological urgency. I strive to create participatory spaces that foster experimentation, often manifested as celebrations and collective rituals infused with speculative fiction and calls for communal action. I’m particularly interested in the dynamics that arise when diverse bodies converge to explore alternative choreographies of movement, joy, imagination, and community, fostering a shared sense of connection and purpose. Through this work, I aim to inspire collective reflection and engagement with our shared environment.
Since 2020 I am the Director and founder of the Social Choreography Lab Helsinki, an artistic platform that works at the intersection of embodiment, choreography, and political life. The lab facilitates collective processes and collaborative workshops, using movement and bodily practices as tools to critically reflect on and reimagine social, cultural, and political norms. Rooted in the belief that choreography is a powerful medium for critical inquiry and care, the lab creates accessible spaces for community-building and supports collective well-being in response to increasingly digitalized and fragmented social landscapes.
Bio
Jon Irigoyen (Bilbao) is a Basque-Spanish artist, performer, curator and researcher. Since 1996 he has lived and worked in different cities such as Madrid, Bristol, Barcelona and Helsinki, where he currently resides. Irigoyen has been a board member and part of Festival Pixelache Helsinki since 2009, and a member of the visual artists’ association MUU since 2017. He is also one of the founding members of the Cluster for Critical Artistic Research (CCARe) at Aalto University, established in 2019. He is a member of the performing arts association Esitystaiteen Seura, where he has also served on the board, based at the ESKUS Performance Centre in Helsinki.
His research interests and artistic projects span the intersecting relationships between embodiment and political life, autonomy, celebration and ritual. Recently his work has focused on the political and social power of movement through the concept of Social Choreography, which forms the backbone of his current doctoral research at Aalto University, Finland. Since 2020, Irigoyen acts as the director of Social Choreography Lab Helsinki, a collaborative artistic experiment at the intersection of movement and political life.