Soliloquio is the second part of an autobiographical trilogy based on a tragic event…
I started working on this autobiographical trilogy in 2015 after a pivotal moment in my life: the death of my sister at the age of 18 due to negligence by the Argentinian medical system. She died because she was Indigenous and did not fully master the Spanish language, which she considered the colonial language of her country. From that point on, I started thinking about the place Indigenous bodies occupy in a world dominated by a colonial mindset. I quickly realised my sister and I weren’t the only ones to face that kind of discrimination. I wanted to observe how all those situations of oppression could occur, and tell the story of the forgotten peoples of northern Argentina. In the first play of the trilogy, created in 2019 and entitled Adiós Matepac (Farewell, father), I tried to imagine a reunion with my biological father as well as to say goodbye to what had long been my aesthetic influence, my artistic father: Greek theatre. When the pandemic shut down the world in 2020, it had been six years since I had last been home in northern Argentina and seen my mother. The pandemic delayed that trip by another few years. At the time, I worked in Buenos Aires for the Ministry of Culture. Hotels were opened throughout the city to accommodate repatriates. I started working with the people confined to those hotels, far from their countries and their families, bringing them food and providing moral support. One of the essential questions those interactions raised was: what would happen if the world were to disappear? And, more precisely, if I were to die from this virus? What would I leave behind, for others in general and for my family in particular? During those long months, from April to October 2020, I wrote 58 letters to my mother from the hotel where I was confined. I think I wanted, in a way, to ease our relationship, to forgive her, to forgive us. In my mother’s absence, I had to raise myself, often on the streets. I understood that this was not her fault but that it was due to the lack of infrastructure to help single mothers outside of the big cities. Mothers have to work outside the home, forced to “abandon” their children. Due to a lack of political will, those families are left behind. It was during that period of reflection that Soliloquio (me desperté y golpeé mi cabeza contra la pared) emerged.
You mentioned saying goodbye to Greek theatre and to the Aristotelian structure, which would be tied to the European world. How did you become aware of this need for deconstruction?
After the first part, dedicated to my biological father, I wanted to deconstruct my way of communicating with others, in order to find my own language. In this very logical, philosophical, and Aristotelian construction, I question both the role of art and that of contemporary thought. In Soliloquio, it is art in Argentina I specifically target. Because, when one thinks of Buenos Aires theatre, or of the theatre of the north, one often focuses on differences, on specific places and spaces. But if you look closely, you realise those so-called differences are actually governed by a single Aristotelian model which imposes the same rules regardless. It structures time and space and prescribes formulas to follow. We carry it within ourselves, unconsciously: it is the product of colonisation. My work is akin to a spontaneous attempt. I do not wish to impose any truth. I am aware that I have not entirely broken from that system of thought and creation. What I problematise in Soliloquio is a possible alternative to that superstructure which governs our lives at different levels. That’s why I’m trying to break away from the idea of a work in favour of the idea of an experience.
Your trilogy may be autobiographical, but it also betrays a desire to connect a personal story to a political action.
All these philosophical and personal reflections are intertwined with political elements taken from reality, to which is added an artistic issue: our world of art has become elitist instead of remaining accessible to everyone. I want to question the demiurgic side of the artists, who tend to worship their creative power. We all too often have the pretension of wanting to change the world. I firmly believe we need to let go of that idea. As far as I am concerned, I try to change the reality of the people around me. That’s why the starting point of Soliloquio is the work I did with indigenous and migrant communities. I’m used to working with South American communities, especially in my native region in Argentina, but also in Brazil, or with migrants and diasporas living in Buenos Aires. In Avignon, I worked with a gypsy community who lives on the outskirts of the city, in order to create exchanges and try to bring down the walls that separate the centre of Avignon from its periphery. There is a fracture between the public space, that of the street, and the private space. Our bodies are most often relegated to the streets. That’s why I invite those communities to enter the private space of the theatre, to try to erase this divide between an inner space reserved to a certain bourgeoisie and public spaces. In Soliloquio, I may be alone on stage, but it is not a solitary work. The performance is the result of a collective effort, of what has been prepared with those communities, which ultimately gives rise to a single show in a shared space.
You include those communities in the work you do before the performance. How do you make that process visible to the audience?
In the first part of Soliloquio, everything I have captured and gathered during this collective work is played out. The show then slowly slides into a second, more personal part, which is about my relationship with my mother. I explore the way my mother and I navigate within the collective. I put myself on stage to show what it means for me to take risks through individual struggle and the defense of communities: at the risk of being seen as someone who is confrontational or who cannot be trusted, both within those communities and outside of them. But this isn’t about militancy or activism, but about a show which evokes political themes, questions of racism, homophobia, and “poorophobia”—fear of the poor. I have a lot of respect for people who engage in activism. What I create is more about expression: speaking is my way of contributing to a certain form of activism, always based on art. Throughout our encounters and performances on tour, we’ve created a lot of video archives. Our project is to compile those images into a documentary to show the work done with the different communities and the places where we performed. At the same time, an in parallel, we use those videos to present what has already been done to new communities with which we want to collaborate, to help them understand the meaning of our work.
How do you invite the audience to take part in the performance?
Very concretely, we meet the audience in the city. The community then becomes the guide of a procession moving from a point A to a point B—the performance venue. Once we have made it to the theatre, the community positions itself at the entrance and welcomes each spectator with an embrace.
Interview conducted by Moïra Dalant (February 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach