Nadia Capitaine, France

Born in Vaux-sur-Seine, lives and works in Sète.

Nadia Capitaine is co-founder of the international performance art festivals Infr’Action Sète and Infr’Action Paris. She has presented performance works in France, Sweden, Italy, Germany, Singapore and China sine 2005.

Mrs Capitaine has over the years developed an experimental intuitive work deeply rooted in her own background as a daughter of Algerian (Kabylian) immigrants growing up in the suburbs of Paris. It is impregnated with images and objects as well as actions referencing to this double culture. Whether it is in relation to rituals, religion, gender or for that matter ordinary actions like cooking. The notion of "human activity" is the principal point of reference.

But also multi-cultural issues of how to exist in between two cultures. In the no-mans land of the colonizer and the colonized, of racism and liberation, of oppression and resistance. Capitaine‘s work is not only dealing with polical and social issues like neo-colonial identity, gender and muslim/catholic culture, the repression of the Kabylian culture in North Africa, or for that mater radical protest. She is primarily working with the live image of her own body and with actions as a non-discursive and non-hierarchic poetry, where nothing is scenographed or told. Where the live image is present or absent, where the absence is as important as what you see. There is never an ounce of spectacle in Capitaine’s performances, but rather images from life invented, reinvented, appropriated, inserted, deturned or simply purely created. Although the symbols and the significations are manifold her performances are yet simple and human.