Carlota dos Santos

Carlota dos Santos is a Portuguese director, choreographer, visual and performance artist based in London. Coming from a background in dance, fashion, and fine art the artist’s work exists in the spaces between theatre, visual art, and performance art. The human being, both as a medium and research tool, is situated at the core of Carlota’s work. There is a celebration of the human body within itself and the various contexts it is inserted in, through a perpetual process of investigation into human nature. The artist is both fascinated and conflicted by the liminal space between right and wrong: what makes a human being beautiful, but also what makes them a monster.  Carlota’s practice searches for a choreographic language that prioritises the real as a process, with an inclination towards endurance and repetition. Materiality and physicality are stretched and explored through animate and inanimate bodies present in her work, and large quantities of materials are usually brought to the artist’s live practice. Carlota’s work is brought to life as it exists, through a state of revelatory intimacy, where the real is made real.
Some of the artist’s work includes Un.being (2020), Absent Matter (2020), There once I was,There I will always be (2021), A Thousand Shoes (2021), Tempo (2022) in collaboration with Cornelis Joubert, Porto Seguro (2023), and Table Manners: No1 as part of a performance collective (2024).  The artist has recently graduated with a master’s degree in Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martins, in London while challenging the boundaries of her artistic practice as the artistic director of the THE LAB.YRINTH (2019), - a project born in Porto that encourages an encounter between art and fashion.