pia watson
oracular dance

Oracular Dance is an ongoing body of work exploring movement, intuition, and embodied forms of divination. First developed through a series of intimate live performances, the project has evolved into video, photography, and works on paper.


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Oracular dance, 2025

Video performance / installation, single-channel black and white video, 11:11 min
Presented at Salón Acme No. 12, Mexico City, Mexico, 2025


Drawing from traditions of divination, Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious, and somatic approaches to the body, Oracular Dance investigates movement as a form of response beyond verbal language.

Presented as a single-channel video installation, the work consists of multiple clusters of improvised movement separated by intervals of black screen. Visitors are invited to silently formulate a personal question and encounter the looping video as an oracle: whichever movement sequence appears at that moment becomes the basis for their own interpretation.

Rather than offering prediction or certainty, Oracular Dance explores the human impulse to recognize patterns, create meaning, and navigate uncertainty through symbolic systems.







Oracular dance_g, 2025
View from Salón Acme No. 12, 2025
Photo:  Alum Gálvez


Oracular dance_g, 2025

59 × 42 cm
Mixed media on cotton paper: photographic prints and ink
Presented at Salón Acme No. 12, Mexico City, Mexico, 2025

Developed as an extension of Oracular Dance, Oracular Dance_g translates the performative work into a visual system of divination. Photographic stills extracted from the movement sequences become symbolic elements that viewers use to construct their own readings.

Through a combination of photographic images, ink, and written instructions for interpretation, the work draws on the structures of tarot, oracles, and other symbolic systems. The piece invites viewers to explore how significance emerges through the relationship between image, question, intuition, and imagination.

The work reflects on the human desire to find orientation within uncertainty and the ways symbolic systems become tools for reflection, projection, and self-interpretation.











Oracular dance, 2020
Edited single-channel video, color
Live performances, Mexico City

During a series of intimate live performances, participants were invited to silently hold a personal question while Watson responded through entirely improvised movement, without knowledge of the question itself. The encounter proposed the body as a site of intuition, projection, and symbolic interpretation.

This edited video is composed from footage recorded during one of those performances. The material has been re-edited through changes in rhythm, duration, and sequence, transforming it into an autonomous video work. It offers a glimpse into the performative research that laid the foundation for the broader Oracular Dance project.








© Pia Watson