ONLINE: Theater as a Remake of the Past

media release: Lola Arias LECTURE: “Theater as a Remake of the Past”

Monday, March 15, 2021, 12:00 PM CST Zoom Webinar

Link: https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/92742151177

Webinar ID: 927 4215 1177

“My Documents Workshop”

Wednesday, March 17, 2021, 12:00 PM CST Zoom Meeting. The workshop is currently full. To be added to the waiting list, please send an email to cvc@mailplus.wisc.edu.

Lecture: Can art be a way to revive the past? How do reality and fiction overlap? What can we understand by the expression documentary art? What kind of writing processes enable these types of projects? In which ways is a play a living and autonomous organism?

Through videos and materials of her works, the Argentinian director Lola Arias offers a videoconference talk about her experience in the field of documentary art and interdisciplinary projects using theatre, film and visual arts in the last decade. Arias will approach different aspects of the genesis and development of her works, where she problematizes the relationship between aesthetics and politics, reality and fiction, art work and social experiment.

Workshop: My Documents is a lecture performance program where artists from different backgrounds present personal research, a radical experience, a story that secretly obsesses them. It has a minimal format: artists with their documents. A way of bringing to light the kind of research that often gets lost in a nameless folder in a computer. The program seeks to delve into the genre in search of a contagion among conceptual art, research, and theatre. A space where speeches, formats and audiences from different disciplines can come together. The program has been held since 2012 in Buenos Aires, Vigo, Milan, Lisbon, with artists from different disciplines.

During the pandemic in 2020, Lola Arias invited several artists, from dance, documentary film, visual arts and theatre to delve into their personal archives for a new global and online version of the program called MY DOCUMENTS | SHARE YOUR SCREEN. In this new version, artists from different parts of the world were virtually there, in their new domestic stage, showing their archive on a shared screen with the audience. The audience could see the performance live, make comments and exchange visions and insights afterwards.

In MY DOCUMENTS WORKSHOP, Lola Arias will share videos of the program and discuss the tools to make a lecture performance based on an archive. The participants should bring a photo, a letter or any kind of object from a personal archive to make a small exercise.

Biography: Lola Arias (Argentina, 1976) is a writer, theatre and film director. She is a multifaceted artist whose work brings together people from different backgrounds (war veterans, former communists, migrant children, etc.) in theatre, film, literature, music and visual art projects.

Arias’ productions play with the overlap between reality and fiction. “Sitting in the theatre, wandering a site-specific location or watching a film, we are inculcated into others’ narratives, wound into their complexities, joys and disappointments. At the same time, we are also invited and at times confronted, in an extraordinary and acute way, to reflect on the contingencies and fragilities of our own stories, individual and collective, as well as on our shifting, unresolved relation to the precarious and dangerous machinery that is social and political history.” (Etchells, in Re-enacting Life, 2019).

Link to Lola Aria’s website.

Both events are free and open to the public. They are possible thanks to the generous financial support of the Anonymous Fund and the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program (LACIS).

The Center for Visual Cultures would also like to thank Art, Art History, Gender and Women’s Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium, Spanish and Portuguese, Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, Center for Humanities, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities.