Interdisciplinary Arts & Performance Thesis (2024) 

Around more than a year ago I found this play, El Proximo Tren by Alfredo Rosenbaum. In it I saw a train, moving inside a clock, a body walking away from the station, with only the sound of the train remaining. 

In this text, I found a distance I had encountered before when speaking about my memories.

La distancia de mi terruño, de ese lugar que con el tiempo se distancia cada vez más y más.

Esta distancia se puede sentir como aquello que no entiendes entre estas líneas por falta de español.

Es lo inentendible. Imágenes cada vez más borrosas, se alejan.

Como un pedazo de tela que se deshilacha.

 In this distance, elements and images struck me, a box, petals, veils… I started working from these elements…

I started gesturing to the elements that made me remember. Nomeacuerdo (or how did i lose the cradle) is one gesture, one trying to acknowledge the individual and the collective, the brush of an arm, the empty room when everyone leaves. Inspired by El Proximo Tren by Alfredo Rosenbaum looks at the questioning of one event, a bride encountered with her empty womb. Picture a wedding. But one where the bride has distanced herself, from the place that reminds her of who she is, who’s passing by her and where she might be.  All she finds are bones piled, she sees through the bones, sits in them, rests. From bones I will count each child, husband,  friend, and procession. Her trying to collect the images into one box, a moving box, fragile and mobile.

The conception of this piece was made possible through that, our own fragility in the room; we worked collectively in this process. To our own curiosity for individual and collective searching and listening, for memories. I never wanted to call myself a director and I don't know if I can. I’d rather be a witness of what happened in space, just another body trying to be present.

I realized when making this work that the box held  even more memories than I anticipated. There were others inside the box with us. Los Desaparecidos from Argentina, 30.000 people with names, still unnamed.

People that went missing, during the period known as the Dirty War in Argentina, between the decades of 70s and 80s. These people were pushed to be forgotten, pushed to their death when they were alive, to become a question mark. 

 Under our feet, under this play,  this remains. We are not trying to speak about this issue or speak for them, but at the same time acknowledge the need for Memory, here and afar. To Give space to silence and conversation around beyond what we can see and sometimes truly grasp.

We are calling you to look, to search beyond what you can see, to search gently and urgently. To witness more than just seeing. An ongoing process, an ongoing way of processing our own memories; if they’re not witnessed then they never occurred. My memories and my origin are  also part of this box, same as everyone who passed by the room. Perhaps buried under a dried bed of petals, unseen, but witnessed.

…

Wood and cardboard, stick and box, house and suitcase, Wood and cardboard, stick and box, house and suitcase, Wood and cardboard, stick and box, house and suitcase, Wood and cardboard, stick and box, house and suitcase.... …

I stand in the missing place in between. In the place of forgetting an expression in my mother tongue, or thinking twice about how my accent sounds nowadays. Or the doorway of my grandma’s house in Los Teques, perhaps the positioning of the door, or the plant next to it. The crossroad between where I am, what I remember and what I’m trying not to forget.

My body of work combines the use of gestures and found materials, in the act of approaching memory as an active verb. The permeability of these so called memories, to become distant from their origin, burying the effort of recollecting them. As an action, it is a constant effort to grasp what was, failing to reach, left with the remains, of what my body can hold. Like the skeleton of a house, without walls, see through.

In this sense I’m interested in my own internal images and associations from where I come from.  As well as those present in the collective and personal narratives found in the outsider, the witness, their own memories and connection to malleable natural materials, their memories.

I found the sticks in an improvisation exercise, where I found myself collecting them. In this amassing action I felt myself heavy, with every stick. Walls were made. A house was built at that moment. I realized I had done this before, and it is a recurring weight of this moving and leaving. I try to remember all the houses, my grandmas, my own one, my friends. Especially those I cannot go back to, looking through the cracks of one that can crumble with a push. That will go down and up again. 

Sticks and boxes, wood and cardboard.

This box was before a suitcase, and the suitcase was a box, a container of sorts, going back to one specific moment where I saw all of them transporting an entire family. Not ourselves physically, but who we were, if they got lost or didn't arrive, who would we have been?

I consciously and subconsciously have changed, rearranged, and transgressed these materials. I started from a box, squared into a corrugated, wet and soggy. Back to a square again, but I need to leave some behind, rip some, leave some. Because it doesn't fit in my pocket.

These works for me are different tries to summarize these past years, gesture to them and to come to terms with the impossibility of returning to the initial image I had. For these pieces and for where they come from.

These are different scenes that I set for myself to remember or forget. Where actions occurred, materials and memories were boxed, carried and moved. They’re about movement, actions that I propose to myself, trying to understand the distance between here and there. The still remaining distance… deshilachandola…

...