2011 » Colombia » Section of Countries and Regions

Curator:	Rolf Abderhalden
Authors of Theme:	Heidi Abderhalden, Rolf Abderhalden
Designer / Architect of exhibition:	Pierre Henri Magnin
Institution:	Mapa Teatro - Laboratorio de Artistas

Mapa Teatro sceno-cartographies: between micro-politics and poetics

Founded in Paris in 1985 by a Colombian brother and sister of Swiss origin after having attended several European schools and worked with various artists (Jacques Lecoq, Laboratory of Movement Study, LEM; Atelier de Formation Théâtrale Philippe Gaulier and Monika Pagneux; Experimental Academy of Theaters in France), Mapa Teatro explores different faces of creativity within an artistic space of uncertainty, non-linearity, and mobility, while looking at questions of time and space, theatricality and performativity, micropolitics and poetics. Located at a physical, social and political juncture that fully admits the dynamics of this paradoxical city – the paradigm of an economically-flourishing Latin American city: complex, hybrid, contrasting – Mapa Teatro and its Artists Laboratory have become not only a space for experimentation and presentation (live arts, music, photography, video) but also a place for individuals or groups and the city to interact in many ways. Scenography has been for Mapa Teatro, over all these years of trans-disciplinary creation, a dispositif centered between micro-politics and poetics. A dispositif as conceived by Foucault: a system of relations that can be established in a “thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical and moral propositions.” The network we have built between these legal, moral and technological elements has made possible the production of spatial dramaturgies, material objects, social crevices and moral pathways in very diverse senses: multiform, polysemous. One way of specifically approaching the problem of scenography as a dispositif, as we ourselves have understood Foucault’s invitation, is to look back at images from Mapa Teatro’s most significant projects and to ask ourselves why, how and when this tension between micro-politics and poetics surfaces. Los Santos Inocentes (The Innocent Saints, 2010), shown at PQ‘11, is the most recent example of Mapa Teatro‘s sceno-cartographies.

Elizabeth Abderhalden (costume designer) and Santiago Sepúlveda (visual artist) are also Mapa Teatro's artistic collaborators.