Biography
Pia Imbar
Voice, Gesture and Trace
A visual artist and lyric singer (mezzo-soprano), I have been working for several years at the intersection of two disciplines: graphic expression — drawing, painting, visual performance — and singing.
Each exists in its own right in my life, with its own demands and rhythms. Exhibitions, concerts, sometimes both combined in a single event — each art for itself. But the question that drives my research is that of their encounter: how can graphic gesture become a fully-fledged scenic action, carried by the singer themselves — not as illustration or backdrop, but as a living presence, inseparable from the vocal act?
This is what I call Canōgraphy: the encounter between graphic gesture and the singing voice. It can take many forms — live drawing, painting, luminous trace — and does not necessarily imply simultaneity. Song and gesture can interweave, alternate, breathe within each other according to the dramaturgical structure. Simultaneity is one possibility I am exploring — among others.
Scenography feeds this research: thinking of space as an architecture of presence, breath, and the body creating in real time.
My vocal training began at the Conservatoire de musique d'Orléans, and continued through private lessons alongside my studies in scenography at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg (in the classes of Herbert Kapplmüller and subsequently Henrik Ahr), where I obtained my Magister (eq. Master) in 2022.
A quieter curiosity runs through all of this: an interest in what is felt but cannot be seen — breath, apnoea, the inner architecture of the singing body. This exploration, conducted under the title Interoception — Mapping the Felt Body in Singing — originated in my scenography thesis as a scenic element, and has since been presented at the Mozarteum Research Competition.
Freediving came later, in April 2024. By November 2024, I had won first place at the Salzburg regional championships, and in 2025 I became both regional and Austrian national champion. My current personal bests stand at 6'02" in static apnea, 150m in dynamic with fins, and 96m without. More than performance, what interests me is the crossing of disciplines.
Canōgraphy
Drawing with light and breath: merging voice and gesture
Canōgraphy is a vocal and visual practice I conceived, in which singing becomes graphic gesture. By attaching luminous cuffs to the forearms of the performer and photographing the gestures with long exposure, traces of light naturally emerge — reflecting the emotional and physical nuances of the singing, without altering the performer’s natural posture.
The word Canōgraphy combines the Latin canō (“I sing”) and the Greek graphein (“to write, to draw”), describing a form of embodied calligraphy in which voice and gesture merge into one breath. Unlike external documentation or intentional illustration, this approach reveals the intimate gestures of singing — those that arise spontaneously from breath, phrasing, and inner impulse.
This exploration began from my desire to unify my two artistic practices: singing and drawing. Early experiments with singing while drawing in charcoal revealed a physical incompatibility between the two. I then developed a process in which the drawing emerges naturally from the vocal gesture, without disrupting the act of singing.
Canōgraphy was first developed at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, as part of the Spot-On-MozART programme (July 2023), which supported its first realisation: three works by Mozart for female voice a cappella, each carried by a distinct emotional colour whose singularity leaves its own trace in the image. The drawings produced in these sessions were exhibited in the foyer of the Mozarteum, accompanied by a short documentary film on the creative process. The practice then had its first stage experience with the production Micromégas: A Celestial Pastoral (Salzburg, July 2025), where it revealed a new dimension: integrated into a staging, the trace of light ceases to be mere illustration and becomes a dramaturgical element in its own right, in dialogue with the space and the theatrical gesture.
The concept and the works have since been presented in several international contexts: the Research Competition of the Mozarteum University Salzburg (2024), the Festival du Bruit qui Pense in Louveciennes, France (March 2024), the Justmad art fair, represented by Galerie Panoptikum in Madrid, Spain (March 2024), and the 21st edition of Design Without Borders at the Kiscell Museum in Budapest, Hungary (October–November 2025). An exhibition is moreover in preparation at the Museo Camera in Gurugram (Delhi region, India) for 2027, and Canōgraphy has just recently been nominated for the WELTENBAUER AWARD 2026 in Rostock, Germany. Several of these presentations — in Louveciennes, Budapest and Gurugram — are supported by the Austrian Cultural Forums of the respective countries.
Interoception
Mapping the Felt Body in Singing
Lyrical singing engages the entire being — body, breath, memory, sensation. It involves not only sound production but the deep, dynamic presence of the self. With each phrase, the singer mobilizes physical tensions, elasticities, and subtle internal landscapes. These drawings seek to give shape to those invisible movements: they are attempts to map what is felt, not what is seen.
Rooted in my own experience as a classical singer and freediver, I developed this graphic language to explore how the inner perception of the body — interoception — supports vocal expression. The practice of freediving has taught me a new dimension of relaxation and stress management, as well as how to observe inner silence. Singing, similarly, draws on the body’s internal architecture — from diaphragm to nasopharynx, from sacrum to fontanelle — in ways that are more sensed than controlled.
These images are neither medical nor symbolic. They trace tensions, volume, vibration, resonance: a muscle stretching, the ribs expanding, or the path of a “rubber band” of support coursing through the torso. Sometimes, I isolate a specific sensation; other times, I attempt a holistic mapping of the singing body. My aim is not to illustrate anatomy, but to reveal a lived, poetic, and functional cartography of the voice as embodied.