PERFORMANCE

I make live art from the position of an outsider. Hybridity and otherness are cornerstones to my work; which is process-led, socially-engaged and driven by queer politics. I stand by the conviction that performance can really do something. I believe the eloquence of its actions can go beyond rational perception; that its porous and refractive qualities are open and accessible to a broad audience; that it generates shared experiences that are visceral, conceptual, and emotional; that it can aesthetically open up a charged space for contemplation and action, within which transformative powers can be conjured for both audience and doer.
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Some of my ongoing obsessions are: palimpsests & rhizomes, archives & catalogues, the passage of time & entropy. I have both a penchant for the Baroque and the Japanese aesthetic concept of 'wabi sabi'; finding beauty in the exuberantly ornate, the broken, and the incomplete. An old friend once said I like art that “shows the flaw in humanity”. My long-standing collaborator Daisy Orton told me that I like my performances like I like my sandwiches: strong flavours, a variety of textures and layers, with lashings of condiments. Yes, I like to get my hands dirty.

I take musico-visual approaches to composition & a dance-like interest in the interior aspects of movement. If I'm drawn to performance as a medium, it's due to its inherent liveness and the opportunities it offers for interaction and exchange. 
My work feels most at home when it flirts with risk, when it dances on the knife-edge between the planned and the spontaneous, between me as an artist and the audience, between structure and chaos. Using effort-based tasks, which tend to carry a sense of jeopardy, I expose the body as an ever-mutating site on which larger forces act. In my work I tackle complex topics in ways that go from the poetic to the carnivalesque, from the apotheotic to the derisive, from the holy to the profane. I aspire to be a beautifully glorious little stone in your shoe.

In 2005 I founded Accidental Collective with Daisy Orton. We devise performances using bricolage approaches, subverting familiar frameworks and having a responsive relationship to sites, contexts, and audiences. Our aesthetics lean towards the hand crafted and the lo-fi. Our work is generous, participatory and visually striking - it has a big heart and a strong mind. You can read about our practice here, and view our past work here.
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Here are some slides about my practice that I put together for students of performance art at the University of Kent.
"It's a pleasure working with Pablo. He throws himself into the work, does research,
and performs with dedication, intensity, and a gusto for the creative process."
Richard Schechner, East Coast Artists Director

"An intimate artist with a powerful stage presence,
Pablo left a very large audience feeling exhilarated and politically mobilised."
Diana Georgiou, Co-director at CUNTemporary

"Pablo epitomises the reasons I curate Live Art. Energetic and inventive, he's proved on more than one occasion to be extremely professional and capable of dealing with challenging situations and sensitive topics with wit, precision, care and creativity."
Giulia Casalini
Founder and curator at Archivio Queer Italia
/ Teoremi Performance Festival / Deep Trash

PERFORMANCE PROJECTS

YES NO BLACK WHITE

Bride of Brexit

​COLLABORATIONS​

OTHER PROJECTS