Blanca Ulloa Heaven Unstuck

Blanca Ulloa is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at New York University and a 2021-2022 artist-in-residence at La Casa Encendida and the Museu D’ Art Contemporani de Barcelona. In 2021, they formed the study program Gear With Petals with Beatriz Ortega Botas, Leticia Ybarra, and Alberto Vallejo at Hangar (Barcelona). 

Through body movement, Heaven Unstuck investigates the persistence of the fantasy of flight in childhood play, and how certain experiences of social restriction force its continuity into adult life, making the naive illusion of flight a sustained form of survival. To do this, the piece composes a repertoire of basic movements, almost instinctive and typical of children’s games, which imitate and evoke birds, fairies, and angels; the stroke like wings and its construction of lightness, the stomping that conceals the support of the body’s weight on the foot. Elaborating this inalienable desire to fly as a queer operation, it proposes a more political exploration of this bodily exercise of illusionism.