RICARDO FRAYHA
producer

Witness to the Ruins condenses our experience as witnesses to one of the most ambitious urban development projects undertaken in Bogota, at the threshold of the millennium. It speaks of our choice as artists, confronted with the deep paradoxes of reality; our testimonial role. It’s precedent lie in the four projects developed by Mapa Teatro between 2001 and 2005: C’undua, Prometheus I and II Act, Re-moved, and Cleaning the Augean stables. Performed in theatres and museums as well as in non conventional spaces, Witness to the Ruins unites in a four moving screen dispositive, the images, testimonies and stories of the last inhabitants of the Santa Inés-El Cartucho district, before, during and after its demolition and the building of a ‘non-place’, the Third Millennium Park. Before and through the gaze of the last inhabitant of the El Cartucho District, Juana Ramirez, who carries out on stage, the same action she performed daily during her last few years at the district (preparing arepas and hot chocolate), we attend a farewell ceremony of an important episode in the life of our city. However, this farewell event constitutes an act of resistance against oblivion, against the disappearance without a trace. This woman’s vitality, her final burst of laughter in the middle of the empty and lonely park, serve as brutal testimony to the survival force in human beings before the disaster produced by the paradoxes and arbitrariness of power.

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MAPA TEATRO

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Mapa Teatro is an Artists laboratory dedicated to trans-disciplinary creation. Based in Bogota since 1986, Mapa Teatro was founded in Paris in 1984 by Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden, theatre and visual artists from Colombia. Since its inception, Mapa Teatro has built a cartography within the milieu of the Live Arts, a propitious space for transgressing - geographic, linguistic, artistic – boundaries, and for staging local and global issues through various “thought-montage” operations. A space of migration, were myth, history and topicality exist continuously; intimate and public spheres; artistic languages (theatre, opera, cabaret, radio, sound and video installations, urban interventions, actions and performatic conferences); authors and epochs (Aeschylus, Müller, Shakespeare, Sarah Kane, Antonio Rodriguez, Händl Klaus); geographies and languages (La Noche/Nuit in French and Spanish; West Dock in Russian, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings in Tamil; De Mortibus in English, Spanish and French; voice, image and movement (4:48 Psychosis, Simply Complicated); memory and city (Project Prometheus, The Cleaning of Augias Stables, Witness to the Ruins, Cartographies in Motion); voice, music and live electronics (Simply Complicated, Love Story, The Magic Flute, Orpheus) simulation and reality (Exxxtrañas Amazonas, Trans/positions); document and fiction, poetics and politics (Horatio, The Holy Innocents, Discourse of a Decent Man and The Unaccounted: a Triptych). Hence Mapa Teatro’s interest in the creative processes and events “in vivo”; in the translation and transposition of writings and scenic scores; and in the operation of putting together documentation, archives and fictions. In recent years, Mapa Teatro has focussed particularly on the production of poetic-political events through the construction of ethno-fictions and the ephemeral creation of experimental communities, Mapa Teatro generates processes of artistic investigation and research, which are developed in diverse spheres and scenarios of a Colombian reality. They are laboratories of social imagination.

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WITNESS TO THE RUINS

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Concept and direction: Heidi Abderhalden and Rolf Abderhalden | Dramaturgy: Heidi Abderhalden | Assistant director: Ximena Vargas | Performed by Juana Ramírez | Visual design: Rolf Abderhalden | Sound and music composition: Carlos Benavides "Champi" | Stage manager and lighting design: José Ignacio Rincón | Camera: Lucas Maldonado, Heidi Abderhalden | Edting: Lucas Maldonado, Rolando Vargas, Luis Antonio Delgado | Production:
Ximena Vargas

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Production in Brazil: prod.art.br | Production directors: Matthias Pees, Ricardo Muniz Fernandes | Executive producers: Jussara Rahal, Ricardo Frayha | Technical direction: Julio Cesarini

Realisation: Sesc São Paulo

Sesc Pompeia

São Paulo, SP,  Brazil

26 and 27/04/2011