Victoria Mata
My name is Victoria Mata I am Canadian /Venezuelan
Among many things that I do in Toronto, I am a dancer and choreographer. My inspiration for movement for creation is our everyday life, I take from the on injustices that happen in our everyday world and transform them, so I use movement and creation and our bodies to transmit that emotion in order to trigger and to change something about the audience that is watching me
I have been in Toronto for eight years, and I have been extremely fortunate to have been given the opportunity to work in the community with the Latin American community but also being involved in the arts since the first day I arrived to Toronto. I currently work at the Hispanic Development Council where I am the Culture and Youth Engagement Coordinator, we use the art as the main instrument to engage Latin American youth into the main stream community, to engage them into all areas so we work very close to other artists as well, currently our main tools are video and photography.
Outside of my work I have the pleasure of working with six other amazing women that are part of a dance group collective, that is called Matadanze, which myself and another dancer, Olivia Davis created few years ago. Our need was to create art, to create movement, to create choreographies that have a meaning, that said something, that moved other women and men of course, but always with a focus on how life and how history have affected the women. So the group grew from being the two of us, to being three, then four, then five, currently we are a collective of seven and we just recently inviting a new member to join us.
So it is a very beautiful collective, and it’s a type of work that is not seen any were else in the city, is very inspiring, innovative and challenging, very challenging work, so is that passion that we all share that moves us and brings us all together to create the wonderful work that we create.
Apart of that I am a muralist. Again I use the art or the process of creating a mural as a tool of engagement, identifying barriers to certain situations and then proposing solutions. So with the murals I had the chance to travel to Colombia, to Venezuela, to work with various first nations communities here in Canada as well as in Mexico. Working with the murals has been also a very big experience, there has been a lot of grow and a lot of critical information that has come out of the work with the murals.
I guess my inspiration is everything I see around me, the hardships, the love, the passion that exists in the city and everywhere else, and as long as I can continue creating with art, photography, or painting, dancing I will be smiling.
It is definitely looking at other women in my life that is the main inspiration, to keep pulling me to keep creating, because it’s our nature to create.