Of Witches and Ghosts: A New Performance during Venice Biennale

Internationally recognized choreographer, dancer, and director Kianí del Valle joins forces with experimental electronic composer and producer Ziúr to present De Brujas y Fantasmas (Of Witches and Ghosts) on May 8 and May 9, 2026 in Venice, during the Venice Biennale. The performances take place within We Travel To Know Our Own Geography, the festival presented and curated by Kuboraum, returning to Venice May 6 to 9 for its third edition during the pre-opening weekend of the 61st Venice Art Biennale.

Staged at the Pier Fortunato Calvi State Secondary School in Castello, the work brings together movement, ritual, and sound to reconfigure the figure of the witch as both gothic and healing, a portal between the terrestrial and the unknown.

In De Brujas y Fantasmas, del Valle explores the complex portrayal of the witch across Latin American, American, and European cultures, moving beyond archetype toward a layered figure shaped by persecution, mysticism, and ancestral knowledge. The piece draws on the spectral presence of La Llorona from Puerto Rican folklore as a symbol of generational pain and lamentation, set against the witch as a repository of healing power.

At the center is the embodiment of María Sabina, the Mexican Mazatec bruja-curandera, whose legacy inspires an investigation of inner journeys and the sacred across generations. The work also references German Expressionist dance, including Mary Wigman’s Witch Dance, to surface shared perceptions of witches across geographies and time.

Directed and choreographed by del Valle, the performance is accompanied by an original score by Ziúr, whose genre-defying practice is known for evocative storytelling and a restless desire to shapeshift. Together, they position the body as medium and vessel, navigating between visible and invisible realms, pain and healing, the spectral and the transcendental.

Now in its third edition, We Travel To Know Our Own Geography unfolds across four consecutive days of performances, live concerts, and site-specific interventions. Rooted in Kuboraum’s manifesto, the festival is conceived as a journey beyond the borders of the epidermis, to know and build one’s own geography. The program resists rigid categorizations of genre and medium, embracing hybridity as a political stance.

The 2026 edition takes place within the spaces of the Pier Fortunato Calvi State Secondary School (Castello 1808, Venice), hosted in collaboration with the School for Curatorial Studies Venice as part of the public program of the exhibition One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin.

Kianí del Valle is a Puerto Rican choreographer, dancer, director, and visual artist whose work moves between the stage, the screen, and the site-specific. As founder and artistic director of KDV Performance Group in Berlin, she develops solo and ensemble works that combine live performance, film, and installation to investigate postcolonial histories, feminist narratives, Caribbean and Taíno indigenous knowledge, and the entanglement of spirituality with ecology.

Her work has been commissioned and presented at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Berlinische Galerie, Sonar Festival in Barcelona, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Palais Brongniart in Paris, and the Venice Biennale. Recent works include Te veo en el horizonte (Paris, 2025), El Tunel (Berlin, 2024), Cortex (Barcelona, Berlin, New York, 2024), and an earlier iteration of De Brujas y Fantasmas presented in Utrecht in 2025.

She holds a BFA in Contemporary Choreography from Concordia University, Montreal, and trained professionally at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York. She has held guest professorships at Universität der Künste Berlin, the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. In 2015 she received the Outstanding Artist of the Year award from the Institute of Culture of Puerto Rico.

She is currently a resident artist at Embajada, San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she maintains an active presence in the Caribbean contemporary art community alongside her Berlin base. Beyond the stage, del Valle has collaborated with Bad Bunny, Residente, Lorde, Travis Scott, Young MIko and Labrinth, integrating movement, dramaturgy, and character development into large-scale music and performance projects.

Ziúr is an electronic musician and experimental producer recognized for defying genre and expectation through evocative storytelling and a restless desire to shapeshift.