Lecture performance is a term that has been used in the last decade for referring to those lectures made by artists and other cultural workers that reconsider how knowledge is produced and how artistic research is presented to the public by experimenting with the main elements of the traditional lecture: space, language and body. The popularity of the lecture performance in nowadays discourses is related to the pedagogic turn and the general interest in creating new social interaction forms, being a very iuseful  tool for the realization of ideas in artistic research processes of contemporary creation   Due to their formal and conceptual characteristics  the lecture performances are achieving importance as a genre  in the current social and artistic context. 

Since last Century, the work of art  is no longer organized from a single center of gravity –text, choreography, image– but it is always multiple and heterogeneous. The “lecture performance” is an example of this phenomenum: a representation that denotes the hybridity of the arts in our century. In the contemporary scene a juxtaposition of the signs is configured: diverse genres are combined in the same scenic realization, generating a new one in which it is not possible to discern which primes. The rise of this type of work converges and is strengthened by the increasing trend of self-reflexivity in stage practice; theory and practice become increasingly inseparable. A change of perspective is urgent to understand, analyze and even enjoy contemporary performing arts. It is an expanded artistic practice, a specific type of presentation that goes beyond the academic format of the conference and that artists (and all kinds of cultural agents) use to make the conference a performance space that, by combining aspects of dramaturgy with education, it facilitates the intellectual, emotional and affective participation of the audience. Thus, it is an educational or mediation format, but it also approaches the performing arts and the spectacle. Therefore, it is usually an experimental and hybrid work that wants to go beyond already encoded formats such as installation, performance or happening and consequently assumes a promiscuous and heterogeneous character. The practice of the dramatized conference seeks to reflect on some central issues on the agenda of contemporary culture, topics relevant to art and concerns that define our present.

Lecture Performance. Piedra que quiere ser montaña (Stone that wants to be a mountain) incorporates these dynamics in a piece that aims to expose and explain the theoretical and poetic foundations of the work of Fernando García Mendez. Teresa Soto Tafalla -writer- puts voice and dramatized to certain readings of reference of the artist who interacting with the dramatization by making a call of attention to different elements of his plastic works,  to which he puts background and/or superimposes a projection, at the same time that illuminates them with a flashlight.