Tiziano, Soliloquio is based on 58 letters you wrote to your mother during the pandemic. Did you establish a dialogue with her through these letters? Also, I am curious, why did you choose the medium of letters to initiate a conversation or exchange with your mother?
In 2019 I premiered my first play Adios Matepac (an essay on remembrance or farewell) in Buenos Aires after winning the Bienal de Arte Joven. The play was a failure in terms of the local market, audience numbers and fellow artists’ opinions–nobody came to see it. It was a solo, which was unusual to what was normally produced in Buenos Aires. Adios Matepac was a play dedicated to my father and a farewell (if possible) to my artistic father, the Greek theatre that has been embedded in my formation. The play told the story of my dad after my sister’s death, his struggle for justice, trying to fill the void.
After the failure of my first play, I thought ‘maybe theatre is not for me’, and I promised myself I wouldn’t do theatre anymore. I had always wanted to write a book even though I have no literary training. I always thought that a book would be a form of social and cultural revenge for my community, because ‘thought’ as such has only served us to survive on a day-to-day basis, our ‘thought’ is not in books.
My first idea was to write a book dedicated to my mother. I hadn’t seen her in six years, and I remembered that the last time we saw each other, we had argued. I had reproached her for the life I had lived, blaming her for letting me grow up on the streets, alone at the mercy of the world’s dangers.
In January 2020, with great financial effort, I was able to buy tickets to return home. The return date was in May, the month of my mother’s birthday, but in March the Covid-19 pandemic began. In Argentina, a quarantine/confinement was decreed that lasted nearly nine months. At the time, I was working at the Ministry of Culture of the City of Buenos Aires, and all our roles were reassigned. A week after the quarantine was declared, I was sent to work in ‘the hotels for repatriated people’, literally hotels that functioned as isolation facilities for those repatriated through a state policy.
In the first months, very little was known about the disease. The only certainty was that contracting the virus could be fatal. And there I was, between life and death. The dead waited attentively behind every bedroom door. I must confess that those months of working there were an incredible experience because I was able to connect directly with people—to encourage them to live, to survive, to bring them food, and to ask them how they were doing.
All the things I thought art had lost its possibility to do. Art often loses the relation to reality.
I truly thought I might die. The trip home was cancelled because the borders were closed. I then thought, ‘I’m going to die, and I don’t want to leave this world without reconciling with my mother’, so I chose epistolary because it was the only possibility. I wrote a total of 58 very long letters, each one reflecting on how I felt that day, and above all recalling the beautiful memories that we share from my childhood.
In those letters, I also asked for her forgiveness. During the time I was away from home, I came to understand that the way she raised me was not of her own free will. We have been victims of a colonial and racist system that forces indigenous and poor mothers to give up their children. In one of the letters, I tell her that ‘politics is complex, and it is a terrain of discussion’, which I invite her to be part of, to fight alongside with me.
The book never materialized, but I was able to reconcile with my mother. My mother learned to read my letters. I returned to the theatre: My mother died this year due to medical negligence in my region.
One of the important and strong components of the work is the search for and exchange with communities similar to your own origin in each of the cities where you perform the piece, and to include them in your performance. Can you speak about the necessity and the process of including these communities, who are living far from their own culture, into your work each time you perform it anew?
In all these years away from home, I have understood and assumed the impossibility of an individual struggle, I have assumed my solitary incapacity. There is a world that I long for, but I cannot build that world alone, where we all have the same rights and opportunities. That is why I seek allies in every place —to fight this cultural and political battle. I search for my people, my community, among indigenous people, Latinos, and diverse diasporas who have been forced to leave their territories in search of better living conditions or job opportunities. When you migrate to another territory, you not only leave your land but also your language, your songs, your dances, your ways of relating, your food, your ways of seeing the world. You survive far from home, so you leave everything behind.
Soliloquio seeks to give value to our culture, our roots, I want these communities to stop being anonymous and to bring our cultural practices out of hiding. I want them to occupy the big stages, I want them to feel that we are people, important people for this world.
Today, we live in an art world or art market where decolonialism or indigenism are very easily talked about. Many times, these concepts remain in the discursive and they are not implemented in practice. Meanwhile, my indigenous brothers and sisters, Latinas, diasporas, in their cities, in their countries, are working in factories, they are cleaning and scrubbing the upper-middle-class houses, working for nothing in hotels, taking care of children and the elderly. We don’t want to be cheap labor anymore. We want a world where we stop merely surviving, we want to live.
Soliloquio comes to listen to each community, to share tools for contesting spaces, to tell them that there is a struggle ahead, and to ask them to unite.
You entered the performing arts world with pieces that center on discrimination, exclusion, and injustice, and you also address the loss of your mother tongue and community. How do you see these subjects otherwise reflected within the performing arts context, and how do audiences in different cities and countries connect with your body of cultural-political work?
My works are autobiographical but universal in conceptual terms. There is a reciprocal relationship between the public and the private, and I think that is one of the powers of my discourse. Discrimination, exclusion, and injustice in all their forms are transversal to all societies in the world, which is why the public can empathize with my shows.
I also believe that there is a global idea of Argentina that our own society has helped create. My plays show ‘another’ Argentina, the one that nobody likes and nobody talks about. I am very conscious that there is a kind of exoticism and paternalism, and I often play with it–everyone wants to see the poor artist, the fashionable indigenous artist. The market is the market, and no matter what I do, I cannot change that. The same goes for art or the art market. Although I recognize its historical force, it doesn’t prevent me from working and working to construct other poetics, other ways of relating, and other ways of inhabiting and constructing a world.
I come from a community that carries the banner of hope. I have understood that what often sounds so banal in this world is the only tool to confront this neoliberal and capitalist system we live in. A person or community that has hope does not consume–and there is nothing worse for this system than someone who does not consume.
My mother used to tell me that we are not alone, we just need to go out into the world to find others. In each of my presentations, I share my sadness, my joys, my questions, my reflections with the public, and I invite them to join me in what seems so utopian, to imagine another world. There is no time for victimization, the struggle is long.