Elisa Badal

This is a photograph taken by a friend  whom I appreciate a lot, her name is Colomba. Who appear in the photograph are me with three very close friends, with which we are also partners in our artistic work. In that moment, we were in the forest, filming a video in the middle of the night, with the light of the moon. The photograph was taken in January of this year, one of the days we were in Cartagena. I really like that photography because those who appear there are very special people for me, with whom I have grown in different areas, like in the creative field and in my formation as a person. That image expresses the love that we have among us as a team, and it reminds me of the beautiful and meaningful experience of filming that video on that trip.

Today I want to talk to you about mental health in the Arts Faculty. Within the careers of the Faculty of Arts many of the students suffer from stress, anxiety and depression. This is due to the high level of demand of the courses taught there, to the bad practices of some teachers, and to the way in which the educational system is structured in general. The level of requirement of the subjects is so high that you must devote most of your time to study, even sacrificing your hours of rest. This creates great frustration because you realize that your life happens to be studying and there is not even enough time to develop your discipline outside of the university. This is compounded by the fact that, despite dedicating almost 100% of their lives to study, the grades are still low, and some teachers, instead of being a contribution to the learning process, harass the students, telling them that they don't have the skills needed for the career, urging them to rethink their studies

My favourite piece of technology is the camara that we have with my art collective. We got it on September 2018, and sense then we use it to make video-dance. The video-dance is an art that makes a union between dance and cinema,  is a discipline in itself, where the recourse of the camera and the choreography are made from the relationship between both. With my colective we make videos and take photographs every month, sometimes more often than other times. I n two more weeks we will have the shooting of a new video. I like it because with that we can create new universes and put in a piece everything that we imagine.  I think technology has been a great contribution to artistic creation, and especially in the cinema, and we have to know how to use it to expand our artistic possibilities.

When i was a child, i wanted to be a performer. I liked to be in the stage, dancing and acting. When i was in the school, i wasn't sure if i wanted to study acting or dance, but in my last year i decide to study dance,  because I've been dedicating my time to dancing since i was 12 years old. My experience at university has been grate. Although it has been hard in the academic field, i have learned a lot in others areas like student organization, feminist movement and now that i'm part of the student center. It has been a great growth in my formation as a political individual. I would like to dedicate my career to the choreographic direction, and also i would like to teach to people who do not necessarily have a relationship with the arts.

Hello, my name is Elisa Badal Fuentes. I am 20 years old and I was born in Santiago, where I still reside.  I love dance, and that's why I'm studying this career. I studied at a school called Rudolf Steiner, who practices waldorf teaching. It is a school that promotes the arts. There I made many friends and with whom I still share.  I live with my mom, who is called Andrea  and she's a chef. I see my dad frequently, his name is Javier and he works as a book editor. I have a sister named Fernanda. Today she lives in Buenos Aires, ten years ago he went to study cinema there and once he finished she decided to stay and live there. I really like Buenos Aires, a cosmopolitan city that I have been getting to know better thanks to the visits I've made to my sister.