I'm Gaby Muñoz, a 33 years old full time clown living in Mexico City. I'm not a normal kind of clown, I like to tell stories. My stories are simple and soulful and based on either real life passages or dreams. To me clowns are poets, inventors, philosophers. They will throw themselves to the abyss without wings, hoping to build them on the way down! Clowns tell epic stories as heroes that can lose everything but might also win the whole world embarrassing their own stupidity, vulnerability and heart.
I started communicating with sounds more than words when I was a kid. I remember my father filming silent movies and me together with sister staring dressed with my moms clothes. He would write the script and then interview us, I was never able to say a word just funny sounds that made my dad laugh.
I feel I'm myself and love exploring physical details that bring me to a more innocent and subtle place. I propose through clowning, that others may find that sensation of just wanting to laugh because your body wants more than intellectual jokes. It's talking about the fragility of life that makes us vulnerable and therefore we laugh.
The best part of making people laugh is that you feel a collective string of love, you feel part of something bigger, an impulse that reminds us that we are alive and that we feel intensely.
More info: chulatheclown.blogspot.com | Instagram
I started social clowning with my friend Sabine Choucair from Beirut, Lebanon, we bought a second hand car and traveled along the gulf of Mexico, bringing children out of schools and giving workshops on how to make them conscious of their environment through clowning. This was the beginning of a wonderful journey. (Photo: Eduardo Loza)
After this I moved to the Middle East and worked in several refugee camps giving shows and workshops in order to empower children and woman through laughter, the workshop was called ¨Conflict transformation¨. (Photo: Sebastian Hofmann)
I worked with a Palestinian group of artists and then years later, Clowns Without Borders USA came my way. It was amazing to have a platform of clowns doing the same thing I had been wanting to do, buy this seemed more structured. I have now been in several missions with them, from working with affected communities in Indonesia from the Tsunami, to the typhoon in the Philippines and communities in Colombia, India, Brasil and Mexico. (Photo: Aura Solis)
I remember visiting an island Mentawai, 15 hours away from Sumatra in Indonesia, where people had no houses left nor electricity and had never seen foreign people. It was amazing to see hundreds of kids running after the clowns, it was as if they knew something was about to take place. (Photo: Pepe Castillo)
I'm a visual person and have always taught in images if it makes sense, then I write them down in separate pieces of paper and start playing around the structure, this is how I build stories. I like to see the images in order to build from them, once I see I start crafting and as sort of a mad scientific, I play with my potions. (Photo: Pepe Castillo)
I now collaborate with many beautiful photographers and when I travel I like to find new artists who can take pictures of a travelling clown adapting to a new culture, rhythm and place creating a new community not based on social ¨nicety¨ but more through creativity, building new ways of communication. (Photo: Marion Sosa)
“Our imagination flies - we are its shadow on the earth.”― Vladimir Nabokov. (Photo: Aura solis)
Photo: Sebastian Hofmann
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” ― C.G. Jung. (Photo: Jimena Carranza)
Photo: Sebastian Hofmann
Photo: Eduardo Loza
“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), It's always our self we find in the sea.” ― E.E. Cummings. (Photo: Andrea Lopez )
Photo: Ely B.
Photo: Jimena Carranza
Photo: Marion Sosa
Photo: Jimena Carranza