‘The dialogue of the dead cannot stop until they hand over the future that has been buried with them.’ This invocation, by dramaturgist Heiner Müller from Germania Death in Berlin (1971), intellectually and emotionally animates Mapa Teatro’s exceptional exhibition at Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia in Bogotá. Curated by Carolina Ponce de Léon, this 40-year retrospective is subtitled ‘Laboratory of a Social Imagination’ – a phrase often used by Müller – in another nod to the influence of the dramaturgist’s non-linear and poetic theatre on the collective. Founded in 1984 in Paris by Colombian-Swiss siblings Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden, Mapa Teatro relocated to Bogotá in 1986, and a year later, adapted Julio Cortázar’s short story Casa Tomada (House Taken Over, 1946), in which a brother and a sister are gradually driven out of their family home. The narrative’s central mystery is who, or what, compelled them to leave.

These themes of displacement, loss, domesticity made uncanny, and the haunted moments that infiltrate and shape our reality permeate the exhibition’s two floors of trans-disciplinary works. Pioneers in the field of live art in Latin America, Mapa Teatro draw from visual art and theatre alike to evidence their intuitive understanding of how concepts migrate across media to form experience.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.