Sensory Concerts

Alicia's Sensory Concerts are interactive installations where the public is invited to explore different multi-sensory experiences. More than just your eyes are engaged as there are things to touch, taste, smell and listen to, all carefully arranged and displayed to invite curiosity and experimentation and open doors of perception and sensation that are closed in everyday life. Symbols, sounds, tastes, smells and textures, some familiar, many not, stoke the imagination and evoke moods, desires, past times and far off places.

As an artist who chooses to work with all the senses, Alicia's work may be related to the menus and dinner parties of the Italian Futurists of the early 20th century. They proposed an art that encompassed all the senses and employed food along with music and other stimulus to create multi-sensory works. They championed the sensory qualities of food to the extent that they invited a future where nutrition would be provided by pills or radio, leaving food for the province of art. Their works included Raw meat torn by trumpet blasts, Extremist banquet (two day orgy of olfaction) and Tactile dinner party.

Like these works by the Futurists, Alicia's Sensory Concerts take as their canvas the human body. The stage set, the work is finally performed on the public's senses through their own collaboration. For this reason, Alicia calls herself a tailor of the body's interior. However, as opposed to the Futurists, Alicia doesn't induce experiences that are uncomfortable or reflect our anxieties in relation to food, instead she explores sensorial pleasure. 'I always look for happiness or integration, I reject association with frustration.'(1)

In addition, Alicia prefers to create works that require the public's collaboration. Her works aren't recipes to be followed; she leads participants to the pantry to explore. She provides instruments and the public become performers, improvising music. Thus her works are playful and liberating.

(1) Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara ‘Alicia Rios, tailor of the body's interior: an interview' in The Drama Review 41(2) (T154), 1997, pp. 90-110, p. 101.