Mapa Teatro

Performance lecture: The Living Museum and Laboratory

31 October 2018 (Laboratory), 4 April, 2019 (Performance lecture) - 11am, 4pm and 7pm (check programme)
Free ticket
Place
Sabatini Building, exhibition rooms and Auditorium, and Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Admission

Laboratory (guided tour and encounter): prior registration via email at programasculturales3@museoreinasofia.es (places limited)

The Living Museum performance lecture: free, until full capacity is reached

Organized by
Museo Reina Sofía

Laboratory in collaboration with: illycaffé

The Living Museum in collaboration with: Teatros del Canal de la Comunidad de Madrid
Mapa Teatro. La despedida [The Farewell]. Theatre piece, 2017
Mapa Teatro. La despedida [The Farewell]. Theatre piece, 2017

The transdisciplinary collective Mapa Teatro explores the mechanisms that build history, myth and fiction. Their theatre pieces, halfway between installations and new dramaturgies, dissect the violence which has so dominated Colombian society in recent years and dismantle the imaginaries created by colonial reason. In conjunction with the unveiling of the exhibition Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity, inside the Fissures Programme framework, Mapa Teatro will present a twofold laboratory comprising a guided tour around the show in the morning and an encounter later in the day with José Antonio Sánchez, an Art History lecturer from the Fine Arts Faculty at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Cuenca) and theorist whose work centres on the relationship between performing and visual arts. The program will be completed with the performance lecture The Living Museum on 4 April 2019.

The Living Museum is a performance lecture which, despite taking place in the Auditorium, strikes up a dialogue with the pieces displayed in the galleries, interrelating two spaces, stage and exhibition, which overlap in this collective’s research. Moreover, it reflects upon the use of the museum institution in memory, collective peace processes and the manufacturing of history. The Living Museum also sets out from an earlier Mapa Teatro piece, La despedida (The Farewell, 2017), and is based on the real case of a group of soldiers who created and ran a museum in El Borugo, a former FARC camp, liberated today, located in the Amazon rainforest, where the guerrilla group held kidnapped soldiers and police. In this museum of historical recreation, soldiers now re-stage, under the visitors’ gaze, the conditions of their imprisoned and tortured comrades. Thus, The Living Museum is an interpretation of the relations between fiction, theatricality and reality.

This reflection is expanded upon on 31 October in a laboratory which surveys the creative process of the exhibition held in the Museo and is set in motion with an investigation into the Sabatini Building’s initial use as a hospital. Following on from an artist-led guided tour, audience members will attend and participate in a conversation between the artists and performing arts theorist José Antonio Sanchez as the laboratory illuminates the processes of translating and transposing texts, documents and archives in theatre fictions and devices.

Participants

Mapa Teatro is a laboratory of artists who work on transdisciplinary creation. Founded in Paris in 1984 by Colombian theatre and visual artists Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden, Mapa Teatro has been based in Bogotá since 1986. Their work experimentally extends across performance, installation, opera, theatre and ethnographic film and has been on view at international theatre festivals such as the Avignon Festival, the Paris Autumn Festival and FIND in Berlin, and in art institutions like the São Paulo Biennial and SFMOMA.

José Antonio Sánchez is an Art History lecturer at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Cuenca). He is the co-director, with Victoria Pérez Royo, of the MA in Arts Practice and Visual Culture at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía, La Casa Encendida, the Teatros del Canal Dance Centre, the Azala Space for Creation and Teatro Pradillo. He is also the author and editor of a broad number of publications on the relationship between performing and visual arts, for instance Prácticas de lo real en la escena contemporánea (2007 and 2012) and Artes de la escena y de la acción en España 1978-2002 (2006).


Programme

Wednesday, 31 October 2018 – 11am / Sabatini Building, exhibition rooms
Laboratory. Guided tour of the exhibition Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity, with Mapa Teatro and José Antonio Sánchez (prior registration required).

Wednesday, 31 October 2018 – 4pm / Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Laboratory. Encounter with Mapa Teatro (prior registration required)

Thursday, 4 April 2019 – 7pm / Nouvel Building, A400
The Living Museum. Performance lecture

 


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