A PERSONAL CARTOGRAPHY

I have always perceived my own trajectory as an escape. That has defined not only biographical aspects but, mainly, the development of my artistical project. At a formal level, every escape requires a plan, a strategy and a series of tactical elements. But what it certainly demands, for it to be effective, is a continuous re-adaptation, always unfolding and maximizing our skills, creating temporary or everlasting alliances, constructing shelters, rejecting any kind of speculation. Biographical and artistic strategies come together.

But, an escape from what, from where?

What drives our biographical paths must be one of the most difficult things to discover, and to name. And this is no exception, though I think that I can identify some of the conditions that gave birth to that movement.

The law of ferocity.

I grew up in Neuquén, the most important city in the Patagonia in the late ‘90s. Growing up in that city was like juggling with Molotov bombs. I remember having the constant hunch that everything was about to blow up, and feeling that would be better than to continue with the juggling act. However, after every social unrest (there were many social conflicts at the time), the city would fall back to its usual apathy, and tension would always rise. And the wind kept blowing. Just like it does with forest fires, the wind feeds insanity and violence. It also fed the most horrid stories, scenes that seem to have been taken from Bolaño’s Santa Teresa, or the real Sonora. Cars burning in the hills with the drivers inside, dead women in farms, inside canals, by the side of the highway. And the city, apathetic, trying to keep its status of touristic and oil-business paradise.

Many years later I understood that the city where I grew up was, and still is, fighting a war against itself. An undeclared war, seemingly silent, but which systematically claims its victims all the same: women, teenagers from the lower classes, kids. Behind a facade of wealth and prosperity, all you could find was the police and dirty oil. Just by unveiling the mask of successful business, unique landscapes and neatly organized residential areas, you could find the law of ferocity.

Hence, an artistic escape is a vital strategy against violence.

SOME ARTISTIC STARTING POINTS:

• After many years of working as a director or a performer, but always as separated things, I decided to be both in this work. I have the feeling that the performer's body and memories should take over the project. This work it's going to be a solo, and my body will be the path to put together this broad constellation.
• I will listen: It does not about making a statement. Disobeying sometimes is only achieved by listening to the sounds that still could not be articulated as language. A language of the lowest, of the horrible, of the unbearable.
• In a way, it’s like going against the documentary, against the suffocating realism that dominates the look on the painful. When the reality wrecks, then only remain the possibility of an invention.
• It's not about myself, my pain, It's an archaeology. I'm not a messenger but an explorer. I'm also part of the threads of death and violence. My body as a memorial, a bridge, an open book, a sacrifice, a medium, a whispering tongue.

ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF THE PROJECT:

The triggers.

There are certain events that transform our perception of the world. Some of them are huge, some are small movements, the infra-ordinary, as George Perec would say. Other times, what makes us move is something in between. The echoes of catastrophe. Echoes that made me turn around and look at my land’s wreck.

My cousin Nicolas Saso took part in a homicide. The victim was beaten up with an axe, burnt and buried alive in a trash dump in the hills. My cousin was judged and imprisoned.

A friend from childhood, Fernando Gatti, was shot in the chest. He bled to death in front of his sister. After years away from hometown, I came back to the funeral. I got lost and confused by the sadness and violence in the city. I realized that, in a way, I cannot speak its language any more.

The police murdered Rafael Nahuel, a poor young man, of Mapuche provenance (natives from Patagonia) as part of a new and systematized attack towards indigenous communities. The young man was shot in the back, and he was unarmed. The government stands up for the police.

These tragedies that are personal, but also social and political have affected me deeply and determined a new vital need to think about and research on violence and, mainly, counter-violence. Of course, this social violence has its historicity, and it is not limited to Patagonia. It has its particularities and similarities throughout the whole history of Latin America.

Why the Selk'nam?

I was a child the first time I heard about the Selk’nam genocide. My sister told me a sad and terrible story. Not so long time ago, a few kilometres from home, enigmatic and brave people had been killed by thousands in terrible ways, hunted like animals, imprisoned, and, finally, the last of them died of foreign diseases. All these people, their lenguage and their mysterious and powerful rituals, violently disappeared, and almost nobody remembered them. This images got stuck in my mind.

A few years later a funny and uncanny character, a friend of my parents, Ralph a German engineer who lived alone in a rotten house in the mountains, told me the other part of the story. Lahusen, the company where he and my father worked, used to pay (in the early twentieth century) one pound by each Selk’nam killed. Now the killers had a face, a very familiar face.

There was a time where magic was real. But was not enough, was not enough to call the wind to take revenge. I still dream about it. About the Selk’nam people. These are dreams where they speak about the future with a strange and distant voice. They rarely have good news.

THE SELK'NAM GENOCIDE

Southern Patagonia was once home to the Selk’nam people, a long-term intact hunting and gathering society. The Selk’nam were relatively isolated until the 1880s when sheep farmers and gold prospectors hired professional killers to attack them. In 1883, the government issued the first sheep ranching concession for the island and settlers began establishing sheep farms. At the time, the Selk’nam tribe had between 3,000 and 4,000 members. Immediately settlers began to chase the Selk’nam off the lands they had claimed, but soon began an extermination campaign with the support of the Argentine and Chilean governments. In addition to hunting the Selk’nam, settlers also poisoned their food. Large companies offered a reward of one pound sterling per Selk’nam dead. This was confirmed by a pair of hands, ears or a skull. Within 10-15 years, the number of Selk’nam was reduced to 500.

Some Selk’nam who were captured were sent to European “human zoos” to be displayed. Few survived the trip and fewer were returned to their homeland. Remaining Selk’nam were forced into reservations near established missions on the island. There, European diseases spread rapidly through the population.

Missionaries were allowed into the Selk’nam reservations to aid them and attempt to assimilate them, but the culture and people had been largely destroyed. The severe reduction in the population of the tribe caused by the Selk’nam genocide did not initially completely wipe out the tribe. The last Selk’nam descendant died in 1974.

THE HAIN RITUAL

Although the early ethnographers became acquainted with the Selk’nam after the period of genocide had begun, enough of the culture remained to show its depth and richness. Almost as a substitute for copious material possessions, the Selk’nam, like the majority of precontact hunter-gatherers, had intellectual possessions of breathtaking sophistication and beauty. Selk’nam has been described as at once “patriarchal, keen on land-property rights, status-conscious, individualistic, competitive, egalitarian, and ‘flexible’”.

The Hain ritual (which can last an entire year) has all the hallmarks of a symbolic and ritual complex designed to both keep women in their place and justify doing so. Its highlights include a mythical matriarchy that was anything but a Golden Age, male overthrow of this regime, and powerful man-eating, sexually voracious female spirits. Although the men run the show, retreating to the Hain ceremonial hut to change costumes and giggle at how much they pull the wool over the women’s eyes, the women are clearly as necessary to the ritual as the men. No theatre is possible without an audience, but this audience is a particularly active and significant one-much of the activity is concerned with instructing flesh-and-blood women and placating and propitiating supernatural ones. It’s believed that women knew that men were impersonating the spirits but forbore voicing their doubts because they ran a grave risk of being killed if they did. The men’s careful treatment of the masks representing the different spirits to argue that they were not merely costumes to dupe the women, but as the ceremonies progressed, became “objects which emanated power and accordingly had to be handled with respect”. They took on a sacred quality and the men also became closely identified with the supernatural.

Many of the female spirits are rather unrelievedly bad. But what they produce (versus what they are) can be positive (one particularly rotten sort, Xalpen, gives birth to a beautiful baby during the proceedings). The familiar theme of women as life givers and life destroyers is portrayed in stark terms in the Hain. The essential male dependency on females is thus appropriately linked with the essential need to control women. Men die metaphorically and literally in several ways during the Hain (luckily they are always revived by a little shaman spirit). Their superiority is revealed in their willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the society.