Lázaro & César Saavedra Nande

Lázaro & César Saavedra Nande are a Cuban artistic duo working between performance, visual art, and embodied practice. Their work explores the body as a site of political tension, affective control, and resistance. Working frequently with displacement and site-specific conditions, they approach space as an active force that shapes perception and behavior. Since 2020, they have developed an ongoing series of numbered actions operating as fragments of a living archive that addresses themes such as censorship, migration, violence, and emotional rupture. Their work has been presented internationally at the ¡Adelante! Festival (Germany), PEPA Performa (Panama), and Galería Continua (Havana), among others. In 2025, they received the Acquisition Prize at Malayerba III.

Our artistic practice develops through the body as an unstable archive, using
action, installation, image, sound and objects to investigate pain, solitude,
alienation, memory and the limits of the body. Working as a duo, we are interested
in situations where personal experience intersects with larger cultural and political
structures. Rather than treating performance as a fixed theatrical form, we
understand the “action” as a process in which the body, space, objects and
duration become active materials. Our method combines research, embodied
experimentation and the transformation of existing cultural images into new
situations.

During the Borderland Residency, we would like to develop a new project centered
on the representation of death in classical ballet. We are interested in the recurring
presence of death within ballet: the dying body, the suspended body, the gesture
of disappearance, sacrifice and the aestheticization of suffering. From Romantic
ballet to contemporary reinterpretations, death has often been represented through
highly codified movements and visual conventions that transform physical
vulnerability into an idealized image.
Our research will begin by collecting and studying death scenes, choreographic
gestures, poses, costumes, scenographic devices and historical representations
from ballet. We will then reinterpret these materials through a different context and
visual language, moving away from ballet’s traditional theatrical codes. The project
will take a bodily and installative form, creating a situation in which movement,
objects, space, sound and traces of the body coexist.
The border itself will become an important conceptual framework: a threshold
between life and death, movement and stillness, the beautiful and the disturbing,
the theatrical image and the physical body. Through experimentation during the
residency, we aim to develop an action that does not simply reproduce the image
of death in ballet, but displaces it, allowing its gestures and symbols to acquire
another meaning within a contemporary, spatial and corporeal context.