Lazaro Benitez
Passing Paradise

Colectivo Malasangre

“Passing Paradise is a transdisciplinary work that draws on dance, performance, visual installation, sound creation, and in situ art. Inspired by the maroon act of escaping control, of venturing deep into the forest to found a new community in “invisibility,” we draw from Caribbean histories—Cuba, Martinique, the Dominican Republic, and Guadeloupe.
In this creation, we approach flight as an act of desertion, as the condition for a utopian possibility.

In a context where migrant, racialized, or dissident bodies are regulated, rendered invisible, or tokenized, Passing Paradise offers itself as a space of refuge, a poetic gesture of embodied disobedience.

We take inspiration from mangroves—border ecosystems almost impenetrable, refuges for maroons—to conceive of paradise not as an idyllic place, but as an unstable, tactile, and collective process.
In Passing Paradise, dance is envisioned as a withdrawal from the forms known to our bodies, an abandonment of our shells. A flight from the Western phenomenological paradigm that privileges sight, toward tactile, sonic, or hallucinated presences.
This work does not claim to reconstruct a past, but to make its subterranean powers vibrate in the present, while at the same time imagining a future. Through this phantasmagoria, we make a flight, backward and forward, perhaps toward our human disappearance, where nature will regenerate among our traces and ruins. It is set 2000 years from our time.”

— Lazaro Benitez, Luis Carricaburu and Ricardo Sarmiento