David Sebastian Lopez Restrepo

Works for Live Art Danmark
2016 Four Performances for COLAB Copenhagen
2019/2023 “Food DJ” at Life Art for Children 2019 and 2023
2021 “Hot Tub” for One Night Stand, the openning event at Friisland
2022 Two performances form the “Wolt Migrant” project: “Halfway from Denmark to Colombia on a metaphorical bike journey” and “The Finish Line” at Friisland.

David Sebastian has been a regular collaborator on Live Art Danmark’s VR Archive of Performance Art and many other projects since 2016.

COLAB Copenhagen
David Sebastian was one of the international artists contributing to our event COLAB Copenhagen. In his performances, everyday objects like coal or paper boats, but in particular food stuffs like potatos, originally indigenous to South America, and many others, become symbols of the multiple plights of people who live far away from their home and culture.

See excerpts of the four performances and the artist talk he gave on this occassion in the video below. The titles and starting points of the videos are:
00:11 Hot Potato, 07:16 Walking Coal, 13:04 Tusind Tak, 27:48 The American Gold, 36:40 Artist Talk.

FoodDJ
Performance artist and musician David Sebastian has enough to do as the FoddDJ in this participatory work, when he holds a lecture, cooks a delicious meal, and makes the very own sounds of the food he prepares audible all at once. The recipes he uses take us back to his childhood in Columbia, and by touching and manipulating the food the audience members themselves, create the abstract noises of the sound track. We first invited FoodDJ to our Live Art for Kids festival in Allborg in 2019, and when the theme of our festival in 2023 was “sound”, of course he had to return.

Hot Tub
When we opened our project space Friisland in August 2021 with the first edition of our new performance series “One Night Stand”, David Sebastian contributed a social interactive performance, inviting guests of the opening to shed their clothes and join him in a mobile hot tub he had organised and placed in the Nordhavn parking lot right outside Friisland. All night long, performance artists and friends joined himm in the hot water for a lvely chat and glasses of champagne.

Hottubbing it: Ellen Friis, David Sebastian, Daniel Nordback, Seimi Nørregaard (left to right).

The Wolt Migrant
David Sebastian took a job as a food delivery person with Wolt. He cycled the streets of Copenhagen until he had covered a distance of 9400 km, equivalent to the distance between Denmark and his home country Colombia, as the crow flies, delivering pizzas and sushi to the Danes with many other foreigners often found in menial jobs like this one. He celebrated both the half way mark and the final moments of the project with performances at our art space Friisland.

The half way mark was marked by pizzas and other foods delevered at random points in time during the other performances of our event Friisland Live #3 in March 2022. He timed it so that he covered the final meters of the total 9400 km just outside Friisland, where he was welcomed with flags, applause and confetti. Inside, there was an exhibition, documenting the experience and background of the work.


About the Artist
Originally from Colombia, David Sebastian started his career as an artist after his bachelor in Fine and Visual Arts at the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia (U.P.T.C.). His production as a performance artist started twelve years ago, after leaving his home country, which is why he considers himself a deterritorialized artist. His identity and work play with the role of a person in constant movement and construction.

David Sebastian often uses food as a material in his performances, prioritizing the interactions involved in the process of cooking and sharing food. In his practice, he aims to create, develop and strengthen the link between performance art, society and other disciplines of art, to generate a dynamic dialogue between art and society, dealing with topics such as migration politics, collective and individual memory, identity, culture, violence and wellness of society.

An extensive archive of David Sebastian’s work can be found on his Instagram.

Om liveart_dk

Liveart.dk was founded in 2004 in Copenhagen to promote the discussion, documentation and development of live art in Denmark. The organisation is equally inspired by the imaginative and entertaining English Live Art tradition as by the theoretical and political German theatre tradition. We have organised 10 large international festivals of Live Art for kids and adults since 2004, and over 40 discussion events, books, video series, symposia and more in the field of live art, performance art, art criticism and documentation. We collaborate with theatres, music venues, art museums and festivals in Denmark and internationally.