June 12, 2025 | Panel Discussion: Perspectives on Movement, Space, and Technology
Date: June 12, 2025, 6:00 p.m.
Location: Crowley Theater, Marfa, Texas
Join the Chinati Foundation on Thursday, June 12, for a conversation between Timo Paris, Nicolas Hünerwadel, and Grisha Coleman. Drawing on unique disciplines and united in their mutual interest in dance, the panelists will examine the intersection of space, movement, and consciousness through architecture, digital technology, and visual arts.
Timo Paris is a multidisciplinary artist from Basel, Switzerland, working in dance and visual arts. Throughout June, Paris has been in residence with Chinati’s education department, teaching a youth workshop during Marfa’s Summer Shake-up program. He’s joined in conversation by Nicolas Hünerwadel, an architect and scenographer, and Grisha Coleman, an artist and scholar working at the convergence of choreography, digital media, and performance.
This discussion continues Paris and Hünerwadel’s previous collaboration. In 2021, Paris selected Hünerwadel’s Sutra House, a retreat center and venue for visual and performing arts, as the location for a video project, la tête dans les étoiles. Together, the panelists will draw on this experience to examine how dance and the human body impact design and explore questions of presence, representation, identity, and transformation in contemporary artistic practices.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Timo Paris is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Paris engages with various media and disciplines to explore commonalities and develop forms. He studied Fine Arts at the HGK FHNW, earning his Bachelor’s in 2020 and completing his Master’s at the Institute for Art, Gender, and Nature in 2024.
In dance, Paris focuses on Breaking, which he has practiced since 2004. Initially competition-oriented, his training included meditation, breathwork, and mental conditioning – methods that he is now repurposing for artistic use. He competed at the Breaking World Championship in Nanjing, China (2019) and Red Bull BCOne Switzerland (2017), has performed in seminal works such as Slantboard, Platforms, Huddle by Simone Forti at Kunsthaus Baselland (2019, 2022) and performed his own works in the event series “I Hear a New World – 14 Miaows of the Future” at Foundation Beyeler, curated by Chus Martinez (2022).
His work navigates the relationship between body-as-subject (dance) and body-as-object (visual arts), using movement, film, drawing and sculpture to explore transformation. Paris’s work has been shown internationally, including at LISTE 23 / Art Basel, Kunsthaus Baselland, and Wilde Gallerie Basel. His award-winning films La tête dans les étoiles and SCRUPUS have been recognized at numerous international festivals such as the New Yorker Indie Critics Choice Awards 2024 (Best Original Dance Film & Best International Art House), Grand Prix of Italy in Venice (Best international Young Director, Best Experimental Project), Milan Gold Awards (Best Experimental Film), and 8&Half Awards Special Event in Cannes (Best Indie Author of the Year), among others.
Nicolas Hünerwadel studied architecture and urban planning at ETH Zurich and the University of Geneva. He joined Switzerland’s largest planning and construction company in 1993 as lead architect, overseeing its architecture and project-development departments. In 2003, he established his architecture firm, Huenerwadel Partnership Ltd., in Basel, followed by the opening of the Peruvian studio Huenerwadel Arquitectos SAC in Lima in 2008. His projects and completed buildings include residential, office, cultural, public, and infrastructure buildings located in Switzerland, Europe, Peru, and Lebanon, as well as bridge designs in cooperation with renowned engineers.
During high school, Hünerwadel started to study ballet and modern dance and continued throughout his studies at university. This dance background led to performing and visual arts projects, including stage designs for theater, dance, and lyrical projects throughout Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Additionally, he’s worked with visual artists Gerda Steiner, Beat Brogle, Badel/Sarbach, Christoph Büchel, James Turrell, Matthew Schreiber, Nathaniel Rackowe, David Zink Yi, Fernando Brice, and Nicole Franchy.
Hünerwadel was a guest professor at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, and initiated and co-led a Master’s program at the Ricardo Palma University in Lima. Currently, he teaches Urban and Landscape Design at UNALM in Lima. In 2023, he included Timo Paris in a workshop. Inviting breakdancers from Lima, Paris performed a walk with students and professors to help them discover the UNALM campus physically and with all their senses.
Grisha Coleman is an artist and scholar who works in areas of movement, digital media, and performance that engage creative forms in choreography, music composition, and human-centered computer interaction. Her research explores relationships among physiological, technological, and ecological systems and human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit.
Coleman is an associate professor of movement, computation, and digital media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. Coleman’s fellowship project, “The Movement Undercommons,” reimagines the use of new mobile motion-capture technology to build a data repository of vernacular movement portraits that center on cocreating critical and often overlooked narratives emergent of movement patterns through animate, sonic, and sculptural treatment of movement data.
Coleman earned an MFA in music composition and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been supported by Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, the MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Pioneer Works, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Stanford University’s Mohr Visiting Artist program, and the Surdna Foundation. She was previously a dancer with the acclaimed company Urban Bush Women and subsequently founded the music performance group Hot Mouth, which toured internationally and was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience.
Chinati’s educational and public programming is generously supported by the Prentice Farrar & Alline Ford Brown Foundation, the Cowles Charitable Trust, the Carl B. & Florence E. King Foundation, the Warren Skaaren Charitable Trust, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the Union Pacific Foundation, the Permian Basin Area Foundation, and the George & Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation. Chinati is also grateful to our members and the people of Marfa and Far West Texas for their generous and in-kind contributions.