2014

Mapa Teatro – Laboratorio de artistas

In painting, a triptych is a formal device comprising three sections or panels hinged together. In the recent history of Colombia, the agents of violence (guerrillas, drug traffickers, paramilitaries) have co-opted festivities and the vulnerability of bodies as a device for celebration, not only of life but also of death. Los incontados: un tríptico [The Uncounted: A Triptych] is an installation-archive conceived for the 31st Bienal which deploys in three interconnected spaces, like a triptych, the remains and traces of parties that have already finished and which the public will attend as the final witness.

The first of the three festivities is a children’s party in the intimacy of a family living room, whose only trace is a radio left playing from which a voice keeps repeating ‘the revolution is a party’ (Los incontados [The uncounted], 2014); the second is a public celebration held every year in a remote village on the Pacific coast, of which all we see are a few fleeting images that show us that ‘the enemy has infiltrated the party’ (Los santos inocentes [The Innocent Saints], 2010); the third is a private party in which the leader of one of the most notorious drug cartels gives a frenzied speech on the legalisation of drugs, to the backdrop of music played by a band (Discurso de un hombre decente [Speech from a Decent Man], 2012). From a poetic and micro-political perspective, Mapa Teatro, an interdisciplinary theatre and artists’ laboratory based in Bogotá, explores the public, private and intimate sphere of different parties and festivities in Colombia, those particular forms of appearance and theatricalisation of violence, as well as its effects on subjectivity and bodies. Over four years, Mapa Teatro has created various experimental artistic devices (performative, theatrical, audiovisual) from materials, objects and individuals it uncovers during its process of research and editing: visual and sound archives, documents and testimonials, experts and witnesses that give rise to images, actions, scores, mediaturgies and ethno-fictions. – MT