Nanouche Oriano

Nanouche Oriano is a lifetime wanderer and wonderer. A childhood spread between Africa, Europe and America has spurred her curiosity and she still enjoys adapting to various cultural or natural environments. She is a gleaner, creating works that revolve around memories, visions and present experiences collected during travels. She observes and records the world in the form of sketches, poetry, sounds, objects, the moving image... Enthralled by certain details, she opens little windows to what she feels is truly essential. Haiku, metaphors and phenomenology inform her work much more than psychology, depicting the subject matter with the causes and effects of direct experience through poetic images and playful artefacts. Juxtaposing and shuffling ideas to give way to new meanings or enhance definitions. Turning things upside-down, downside-up, inside-out, outside-in so as to see better.

She is keen on creating affinities between people and a sense of togetherness through sensory, participatory or interactive art as well as community art. Similarly in performance, she hopes to assist audiences to escape from confinement by bonding them via emotional journeys of childlike wonder or sometimes quasi-ritualistic mazes.

Her background lies in visual arts (animated film, scenography, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, land art). Yet, a new found urge to use more live performance in her practice has led her to explore visual theatre, performance art, movement and puppeteering since 2011, with special emphasis on site-specific performance, puppets and mime, shadow theatre, new media, object theatre, giant puppets, animated sets, street performance, performing in nature, and butoh dance. In order to investigate and blend these disciplines, she has been traveling around Europe and Asia, dedicating herself to researching various traditions of puppets and automata, creating and taking part in both staged and non-staged performances, volunteering in community arts projects, doing artist residencies, teaching, as well as regularly attending research labs and professional development workshops.