Text published in the Catalogue of the Exhibition: Mapa Teatro. Of Lunatics or Those Lacking Sanity. MNCARS, Madrid, 2018, pp. 6-18.
Mapa Teatro’s latest fissure speaks of a faraway crevice that is still open today, a place of desire and exploitation, ingenuity and brutality, resistance and oblivion. Fiction is to the fissure what gunpowder is to the crevice: it cuts through the surface to make the hidden visible. The act itself produces a narrative that might almost be read as a fairy tale; yet the act’s very nature, in that it emphasizes the poetic, is a taking of sides: it is a response to the cleft left by extraction, to rationalist arrogance, and to erased memories.
Mapa Teatro is not a theater collective but a «laboratory» of artist who experiment with creative, investigative, and interventionist procedures in multiple formats (staged, audiovisual, discursive) and fields (artistic, academic, urban). Mapa Teatro’s artists define themselves as practitioners of «live arts» and term the results of their artistic procedures «gestures». The «live» element does not refer to life itself but to temporary experiments that use human bodies to explore specific issues and contexts without predefined disciplinary limitations. The «gesture» is a form of poetic thinking that breaks free from a purely discursive medium and resists bing pinned down, categorized, or conserved out of context and neutralized of its political power.