Lilia Mestre

Lilia Mestre (Lisbon,1968) is a performing artist and researcher based in Brussels working mainly in collaboration with other artists. She interested in art practice as a medial tool between several domains of semiotical existence. Mestre works with assemblages, scores and intersubjective set ups as an artist, curator, dramaturge and teacher.

Since 2008 she has been mentor, workshop facilitator and associated program curator at postgraduate program a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) in Brussels, where she has been developing a research on scores as pedagogical tool titled Scorescapes. In this context, her contribution focused on performativity as a discursive practice and led to a method based research on dialogical and intersubjective formats, as enablers of exchange in artistic research.

In the context of the a.pass research centre, Mestre edited the book Turn, Turtle! Reenacting the Institute, Performing Urgency #2 with Elke van Campenhout, published by House on Fire. This publication addresses institutional critique viewed from the performing arts perspective and contains several essays by artists and theoreticians as examples of collaborative institutional critique.

In 2019 - 2021 she has worked with Prof. Jill Halstead and Prof. Brandon LaBelle in Social Acoustic, a research project supported by the University of Bergen, Norway.

She was co-founder of Bains Connective Art Laboratory in Brussels (1997), an artist run, multidisciplinary working place for experimental practices, where she took the role of project dramaturge in 2006 and artistic coordinator between 2009 and 2016.

Since 2017, Mestre is artistic coordinator of a.pass - Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies in Brussels. www.apass.be.