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Sylvia Jaimes Niño- Artist Portfolio

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ARTIST PROFILE


Silvia Jaimes is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on the body as expressive matter and presence as a territory of investigation. Her work unfolds within interdisciplinary collectives, expanding her research into fields such as dance, music, history, and language studies.

She has participated in festivals, residencies and exhibitions across Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Croatia, Portugal and Switzerland. 

Key venues include the Kunstmuseum Thurgau, the Festival de Danza en la Ciudad in Bogotá, the Festival de la Imagen in Manizales and the Festival Dança à Deriva in São Paulo.

She is also a member of two international cultural associations — Colapso, based in Portugal, and Cosmos, which promotes artistic exchange between Colombia and Switzerland. Through both, she contributes to artistic production, event organization and international residency programs.

ESP

PERFIL DE ARTISTA

Silvia Jaimes es una artista interdisciplinar cuya práctica parte del cuerpo como materia expresiva y de la presencia como territorio de investigación. Su trabajo nace del encuentro con otros lenguajes, y se desarrolla en el marco de colectivos interdisciplinares que amplían y enriquecen la investigación, llevándola a territorios como la danza, la música, la filosofía, la historia y los estudios del lenguaje.

A lo largo de su trayectoria ha participado en festivales, residencias y exposiciones en Colombia, Brasil, México, Italia, Croacia, Portugal y Suiza, siendo parte de escenarios como el Kunstmuseum Thurgau, el Festival de Danza en la Ciudad  en Bogotá, el Festival de la Imagen de Manizales y el Festival Dança à Deriva de São Paulo, entre otros.

Paralelamente a su práctica artística, hace parte de dos asociaciones internacionales de creación y gestión cultural — Colapso, con sede en Portugal, y Cosmos, que promueve lazos de intercambio artístico entre Colombia y Suiza —, desde las cuales participa en la producción artística, la organización de eventos y la gestión de residencias a nivel internacional. Esta trayectoria de alcance plural da cuenta de un compromiso sostenido con la experimentación y el encuentro entre disciplinas.

Theatre and Dance Festivals
Exhibitions Visual Arts
Theatre and Dance Festivals

2017 NOV 

X Festival Danza en la Ciudad. Casa del Teatro Nacional // Bogotá COL


2017 APR 

IV Festival Pliegues y Despliegues. La Factoría L' explose // Bogotá COL


2016 MAY 

Season. Fundación Teatro Varasanta // Bogotá COL


2014 DEC

2 edição Festival Dança à Deriva. C. de Experimentación Coreográfica // São Paulo  BRA



2012 July

Season of Colombian pieces. Teatro Jorge Eliécer Gaitán// Bogotá, COL


2011 Sep 

Festival Internacional Grado Cero. Teatro Libre Centro // Bogotá, COL


2011 Dec

Interdisciplinary Creation Grant 2011. Teatro Jorge Eliécer Gaitán // Bogotá, COL


2010 Nov

III Festival de Danza en la Ciudad. Fundación Teatro Varasanta // Bogotá, COL


2010 Feb

Lunes y Martes de Performance .La Factoría L´explose // Bogotá, COL


2009 Aug
2 Encuentro Inter. de Artes Vivas. Museo de Arte, U. Nacional//Bogotá, COL

Exhibitions Visual Arts

2019 SEP

Cosmos Supercluster. Ittingen Kunstmuseum// Thurgau SWI

 

2018 APR 

L´occhio Irresponsabile. Neo Associazione Culturale // Udine ITA


2016 MAY

Festival Orgánico. Museo de Arte del Tolima// Ibagué COL


2015 DEC

Sinfonía Trópico. Flora Ars Natura // Bogotá COL


2011 APR
X Festival de la Imagen. Universidad de Caldas// Manizales COL 

2009 AUG
2 Encuentro Inter. de Artes Vivas. Museo de Artes U. Nacional // Bogotá COL 


Ana & Louise

2025 (on-going project) 

"The day I met my grandmother, I was 45, and she was 114. Her bones rested in a beautiful wooden box, along with an unidentified body. Each of them was properly isolated from the other by a sealed plastic bag.."


My grandmother died quite young. I don't have any memories of her as a child, I never established a relationship with her as a kid. We meet now, in a kind of camaraderie; both in our forties, in a world that has changed a great deal in several things. Our conversation unfolds more among friends than relatives.  It becomes relevant when we realize that some of the issues that determined my grandmother's choices seem to be building up again. 

Brieff
Description
Ana
Brieff

ANA & LOUISE is a project that emerged from our grandmother's stories and the way that time and repetition started to show new reflections among their anecdotes; how the act of intertwining political and historical aspects to  these anecdotes became increasingly important to have an adult conversation with them.

The project is a call to recover and expand this practice (sharing our family stories), and this archive, as far as possible; our frame relies on anecdotes of women who were born between 1900 and 1930 and who lived through the first half of the 20th century. We believe that their stories provide an appropriate lens through which to understand many of the issues that haunt us today. They are written in the first person to preserve the intimacy within, even though their reflections seem to us universal.

Description

It is an ongoing project developed in many languages, and is geographically located in places like Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Prussia and Switzerland. 

Within the project, we allow each story to have its own space, to follow its own path. 

The stories within this project behave like independent geographies, whose furrows allow connections to be created. By not imposing a direct correspondence between them, we allow non-hierarchical relationships to evolve between the global north and global south, for example.

Ana

ANA. I have one single photo of my grandmother. From this portrait, I try to imagine how tall she was, her voice, her ways, her ideas. 

My grandmother died in 1951, thirty years before I was born. Her absence had a profound effect on my father and his siblings. They hardly ever spoke of her. 

My desire to know more about her led me to visit the city where she lived her entire life, Málaga


    Unlike the Spanish city of the same name, the Colombian city of Málaga is closer to the mountains than to the sea. It also stands closer to the Venezuelan border  than to the Atlantic and Pacific Colombian coasts.


 There are three access roads. The southern road wiggles over two "páramos" leading to Bogotá, Colombia's capital city. Through the north its connected with Pamplona and Cúcuta (the main border between Colombia and Venezuela). This is perhaps the road in the best condition at present. To the southwest stands Bucaramanga, the departmental capital. To travel from Málaga to Bucaramanga, you need to skirt the Chicamocha Canyon on a road that still today has a poor condition; usually so narrow that it barely fits one vehicle. 

It takes about 5 hours to travel 120 kms on this road. This does not prevent small trucks and mini-vans from passing through here every day, defying the abyss that stretches out on the other side of a steep wall.

04 de noviembre de 2025.

Image of a part of the road Málaga-los Curos that crashed recently because of the rain season. 

Birds that Echo Their Way Through the Looking Glass

2019 Cosmos Supercluster. Ittingen Kunstmuseum, // Thurgau SWI

Multimedia installation- performance


"My observational data indicates that there is no exclusive avian vulnerability to windows based on age or sex, season, time of day, weather, window type or setting.

The findings indicate that glass is an invisible and potentially lethal hazard for all birds, but especially for those in flight".

Pg.11DK, 1989.

Creative Team
Brief
Description
image credits
Creative Team

DIRECTOR: Sylvia Jaimes

SOUNDSCAPE AND SOUND OBJECTS: Leonel Vásquez

VIDEO INSTALLATION: Bojan Mucko

COREOGRAPHY: Helena Reis and Sylvia Jaimes

PERFORMERS: Mirjam Wanner, Helena Reis, Bojan Mucko, Sylvia Jaimes

Special Collaboration: workers of the Ittingen Foundation

Special thanks to: Cosmos collective, Thurgau Kunstmuseum.

Brief

“Several authors have speculated that birds hit windows because of: (1) defective eyes (Willet 1945), (2) impaired vision due to smoke (Langridge 1960), blinding glare (), mist () alcohol (), or diverted attention (Dunbar 1949, Giller 1960, Bent, Raible, Valum, 1968)".

The interest in understanding, imitating, and communicating with birds has existed for a long time in human history, manifested in practices, texts, and musical scores related to how we could assimilate the extravagant sounds of birds into our bodies, our voices, and our machines. 
We look back at this data and compose a collage of actions that activate a sound installation.
Description

Even though it is an ancient curiosity, the interest in understanding the sound manifestations of birds remains latent. It is as if it were a place to which we end up returning/visiting out of sonic curiosity, sometimes in the hope of establishing communication and other times with the desire to exercise dominance. 

This project has its starting point in a scientific article that proposed a cognitive parallel between songbirds and human primates, recognizing in both the possibility of learning and memorizing complex sound phrases to develop a generational auditory memory and communication through language. 

image credits

Images by: 


Mirjam Wanner

Goran Skofic

Miguel Braga

Empathy

2018 APR 

L´occhio Irresponsabile. Neo Associazione Culturale // Udine ITA


2017 NOV 

Festival Danza en la Ciudad. Casa del Teatro Nacional // Bogotá COL


2017 APR 

Festival Pliegues y Despliegues 2017. La Factoría Léxplose // Bogotá COL


2016 MAY 

Fundación Teatro Varasanta //Temporada. Bogotá, COL


Interdisciplinary ensemble


Empathy resembles a desire for correspondence in a society with a lack of spontaneous communities. In this piece we construct a virtual version of meaningful encounters; puppets and tridimensional projections of animals, that serve as spirits, inforcing their process of extinction. 

Creative Team
Brief
images
image credits
Creative Team

DIRECTOR: Sylvia Jaimes

SOUNDSCAPE: Mateo Mejía

LIGHTING DESIGN: Luis David Cáceres and Juan Carlos Aldana

CHOREOGRAPHY/ performers: Sofía Mejía, Mateo Mejía, Juan Camilo Herrera

PUPPETER: César Duarte

3D MODELS and animation: Daniel Rodríguez 

CUSTOME DESIGN: Rebeca Rocha

SCENOGRAPHY: Hilda Niño, César Duarte, Sylvia Jaimes

VIDEO FOOTAGE & Photo by: Felipe Camacho, Carlos Camacho, Jaimes Gómez

Special thanks to: Estefanía Gómez, Beto Urrea, Diego Sylva, Constance VN


Brief

 Empathy resembles a desire for correspondence in a society with scare spontaneous communities. 


In this piece, a wild desire for affinity manifests in several attempts to develop a spiritual choreography; we improvise Sufi movements to approach the dance of celestial bodies;and resemble the communicational behaviour of whales. 

"We intend to establish close communication with a huge whale, trusting the anatomical coincidences in both of our brains. We confront the other with our deepest desires, bumping into our psychological boundaries." 
images
image credits

Images by: 


Felipe Camacho (Pausar)

Carlos Camacho


Gallada del Toche

2016 MAY

Festival Orgánico. Museo de Arte del Tolima// Ibagué (Col)


2015 DEC

Sinfonía Trópico. Flora Ars Natura // Bogotá (Col),


"La Gallada is a sound experiment in which we deconstruct the sound of birds and transform it into an ensemble, a band. The idea for “La Gallada” came from the name given to groups of young boys who get up to mischief in the neighborhoods in the afternoons. The galladas summon their members with a loud whistle, just as birds would to warn or greet one another. For us, it was a perfect metaphor, and we created our own whistle for our gallada.

We try to translate the birds’ sound universe into the human voice, or we ask ourselves: what instruments can replicate these sounds? 

The project is conceived as a laboratory. Our starting point is to listen, listen, listen. Sometimes we use recordings made on-site, visit places where these birds can be spotted, or research their songs in sound collections available online, such as Cornell University’s. Then, together with our guests, we explore the sonic possibilities of translating what we hear.

For example, when we worked with Nicolás Vega, a musician and visual artist who dared to “speak like a bird” through the sound of his cello, and Mateo Mejía, a guitarist and composer, we created several soundscapes. On another occasion, we worked with Carolina Ceballos and the Oper choir, creating musical interpretations of the sounds of the crested tit and the pigeon in the form of choral arrangements. ¶ In every version of the project we’ve created, we start by working with birds native to the local environment; when we developed the piece for Bogotá, for example, we worked with blackbirds, crested tits, and great tits. Generally, to reproduce a bird’s sound, you need more than two people; this is due to the way a bird’s vocal apparatus works. Its airflow system emits more than one sound at a time. For this bird’s sound, two voices working in relay are needed; at first, each of us had a different part, and we synchronized to be able to fragment it.” 

Investitures (Investiduras)

2012 July

Season of Colombian pieces. Teatro Jorge Eliécer Gaitán// Bogotá (Col)


2011 Dec

Interdisciplinary project grant 2011. Teatro Jorge Eliécer Gaitán // Bogotá (Col),


Investiduras is a project that explores the question of identities and their capacity for change. It is a patchwork quilt of stolen dresses, a jumble of fibers and paints, a mutating cloak that allows one to change one’s personality. It is the risk of contagion implicit in contact.

Investiduras dissects the physical act of dressing: the gesture, the poetics, and the politics of donning a garment.

It is an interdisciplinary project that explores the languages of sculpture, painting, installation, sound, and performance, in an experimental staging where all these elements are intertwined. 

Dirigida por: Colectivo los Desvestidos (Alejandro Cárdenas, Jenny Fonseca, Rebeca Rocha, Eduardo Oramas, Sylvia Jaimes)

Video en vivo: Diego taborda, Sebastián Rocha

Performers: Heloise Cuissins, Abelardo Jaimes, César García, Nelson Martínez, Marco Gómez, Laura Barceló, Laura Barragán, Edwin Vargas, Luisa Camacho, Ricardo Villota, Juliana Atuesta, Andrés Lagos, Bibiana Carvajal, Vanesa Henriquez.

Diseño de Iluminación: Juan Carlos Aldana

Diseño sonoro: Ana maría Romano

Confección de tapete de ropa,: Hilda Niño y Maria Eugenia de Maldonado.

Images by: 


Felipe Camacho (Pausar)


Al Oído de un Detective Salvaje

2011 APR

X Festival de la Imagen. Universidad de Caldas// Manizales COL


A sound cartography developed in reference to the book by Roberto Bolaño “Los Detectives Salvajes”. 

Soundscapes captured in Bogotá and México DF. Language Spanish.


This Net Art proposes an alternative way of visualizing and narrating the prismatic story of two friends that disappear from a teenage intense social circle. The book from Bolaño is constructed among multiple voices that conform the body of investigation (interviews) done by the detectives, that assume the missing kids case. 

We take advantage of this multiplicity and transform it into a constellation of overlapping places, accents and voices.

(This interactive is currently unavailable because of a compatibility with new browsers, a video demo may be previewed on the following link)

 Based on the book by Roberto Bolaño: 

"Los Detectives Salvajes".


Net Art by: 

Sergio Caballero and Sylvia Jaimes

Soundscapes captured by: Sylvia Jaimes and Alejandro Lurduy.

Special thanks to:

FONCA Mexico, the Ministry of Culture in Colombia and Festival de la Imagen Colombia.

Daniel Montero, Makia Lara and Sandra Gómez. 

Vocal Bucal

2014 dec

Dança a la Deriva 2014 . C. de Experimentación Coreográfica // São Paulo, (Bra)


2011 Sep 

Festival Internacional Grado Cero. Teatro Libre Centro // Bogotá, (Col)


2010 Nov

III Festival de Danza en la Ciudad. Fundación Teatro Varasanta // Bogotá, (Col)


2010 Feb

Lunes y Martes de Performance .La Factoría L´explose. Bogotá (Col)


2009 Sept

Operation Antilope- Bogotá. El Estudio// Bogotá (Col)


2009 Aug
2 Encuentro Inter. de Artes Vivas. Museo de Arte, U. Nacional//Bogotá (Col)

(In Spanish, the word vocal refers to sound manifestations as singing and speech, and at the same time, one of the primary forms of language, vowels. On the other hand, bucal is used to name the mouth’s area, larynx, and vocal chords, where the voice emission takes place.)

Brief
Creative Team
images
Brief

Vocal Bucal is an open experiment that looks to bring sound to its material substance. It is a scrutiny of fragility from diverse angles: the fragility of technology, communication, and language. The performance takes place inside a large spider web made of knitted Copper wire, a sound installation that responds sonically to touch.

The performer touches and breaks portions of the web, provoking a subtle noise that progressively becomes a concert for noise. Everything concludes with a song in which the performer’s voice transitions from a lyrical and sweet tone to guttural screaming. The delicate actions experienced at the beginning are transformed into an event where all elements (her voice, the concert, the installation, and the space) collapse because of vibration.

Creative Team

DIRECTOR and PERFORMER: Sylvia Jaimes

SOUNDSCAPE: Mateo Mejía

LIGHTING DESIGN: Luis David Cáceres 

CUSTOME DESIGN: Diego Jaimes

SCENOGRAPHY/ Installation:Sylvia Jaimes

VIDEO FOOTAGE & Photo by: Diego Jaimes, Diego Taborda, Juan Alonso, Carlos Mario Lema, Jenny Fonseca, Sofía Mejía, Alejandro Cárdenas.


images

Images by: 


Jenny Fonseca

Sofía Mejía

Diego Jaimes

Diego Taborda

Alejandro Cárdenas

Juan Carlos Alonso