In her video Shelly Belly Inna Real Life (2020), Cecilia Bengolea investigates dance, always at the center of her artistic research, as a universal language, a generator of meaning and of an idea of community in which individual and collective bodies take shape by nourishing each other in their interaction with the environment. Filmed in Jamaica between 2015 and 2019, the work is the result of a long period of mutual exchange between the artist and the dancehall scene of Kingston and Bog Walk, whose personalities, influences and dynamics are explored in an immersive and spontaneous approach. The codes of video art, documentary and performance contaminate each other and overlap in a complex branching of meanings and visual outcomes, which see movement and music interact with the urban and natural landscape of the Caribbean island. The 3D animation Bestiaire (2019) focuses instead on the artist’s body only, subjected to multiple distortions that form a catalogue of imaginary creatures. The work, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ research on fantastic zoology and Baruch Spinoza’s principles of the expansion of the self through the other, is an investigation into the expansion of the body in the realms of imagination and utopia.