telondefondo. Revista de Teoría y Crítica Teatral

Theater, Performance and the City: Aesthetics of Inhabitance, the Common and Memory

2025-09-09T22:15:28+00:00

Introducción al Dossier "Teatro, performance y ciudad: estéticas del habitar, lo común y la memoria"

Layers of Memory: Loci of Enunciation and Site-Specific Performance

2025-09-09T22:15:30+00:00

This article examines how the site-specific performance Streaming de la memoria by Compañía de Funciones Patrióticas redefines spaces in the Almagro neighborhood of Buenos Aires, transforming them into territories of memory. The article also contextualizes March 24 as a pivotal date for commemorating the history of state terrorism in Argentina and explores how the performance collective Compañía de Funciones Patrióticas intervenes in symbolic neighborhood sites, such as Confitería Las Violetas, linking local memories with recent historical events. Through site-specific staging and a focus on “Relato Situado” (situated story), the performance engages participants in actions of memory, fostering collective and affective experiences. The methodology of this article combines elements of Participatory Action Research and autoethnography to demonstrate how the performance interventions of Compañía de Funciones Patrióticas illuminate hidden memories and redefine urban space as an “expanded theater,” intertwining everyday life with the political sphere. The article concludes that these practices generate a “geopoetics of memory,” allowing residents to experience public space as a site of resistance and historical reflection, where the past is activated and re-signified in the present.

The City Behind the City: Performance, Past, and Memory in Buenos Aires

2025-09-09T22:15:32+00:00

This paper argues that performances set in recognizable public spaces in the City of Buenos Aires open, through their own dynamics of representation, a temporal depth towards the past of a place. At the same time, they present shared deictics that can contribute to the construction of citizenship, understood as a daily, situated, and political act. Both Un paisaje para mí (Silvia Gómez Giusto and Aliana Álvarez Pacheco, 2023), performed at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and Una obra más real que la del mundo (Mujer Mutante, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023), performed at Chacarita Cemetery, take on the structure of a guided tour. These interventions can be read as modes of enunciation about their respective loci of performance and explorations at the intersection of urban space, history, and memory.

"Our Winter Carnival": An Ethnographic Study of the Fogata de San Pedro y San Pablo (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

2025-09-09T22:15:33+00:00

This article analyzes the Fogata de San Pedro and San Pablo, a popular outdoor celebration held in Parque Avellaneda, in the westernmost periphery of the City of Buenos Aires (Argentina). As a cultural event, the Fogata will be studied through the lens of anthropology and performance, with a particular focus on the role street-theater artists play in organizing the event and their ties to the cultural politics that determine the public agenda of the neighborhood.

“Making the Invisible Visible”: Strategies of Representing the Disappeared in the Actions of the Artivist Group Las Mariposas A.U.Ge.

2025-09-09T22:15:33+00:00

This paper looks at the strategies used in artistic interventions within Argentine human rights movements to represent the disappeared, focusing on the use of posters, circular marches, and silhouettes. To this end, we analyze the actions carried out by Las Mariposas A.U.Ge., a contemporary artistic collective, and establish connections with the human rights movements of the late 1970s and 1980s, particularly two actions organized by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. With no way to restore the lives of the disappeared, and with no certainty regarding their fate, artistic interventions emerge at the intersection of mourning and political denunciation, offering a powerful means of remembrance and resistance.

Lights in the Riot. Audiovisual Interventions in the Public Space in Argentina 2000/2003

2025-09-09T22:15:34+00:00

The year 2000 marks the beginning of an expansion of audiovisual interventions in public space in Argentina, partly due to increased access to projection devices, but also driven by the socio-political and economic circumstances that mobilized artists, activists, and intellectuals to take to the streets. This essay delves into the interventions carried out between 2000 and 2003 in the City of Buenos Aires—a period during which one of the most significant uprisings in the country's political history occurred—and argues they acted as a means of social interaction and symbolic appropriation of public space for ideological, aesthetic, and countercultural purposes. It also analyzes how the political context stimulated or connected to key qualities of these situated practices: their creative processes—marked by strong collectivization—and their aesthetic qualities, resulting from a fervent state of political urgency.

Buried but Alive, Whole or in Pieces: Aesthetic-Political Exhumations of a Cultural Henhouse

2025-09-09T22:15:37+00:00

This article focuses on the phenomenon of café concerts in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s. Conceived as independent cultural spaces and, therefore, communal meeting grounds, café concerts were a particular locus for humor during complex decades: they allowed the circulation of alternative voices and the expression of an emerging and biting political satire in a context of censorship and dictatorship. A history of the spatiality of this phenomenon allows us to think about the current state of independent artistic culture in Argentina, with government policies that limit rights of access to culture. This history also prompts critical questions: Might we derive other possible political and poetic coordinates for contemporary cultural practices from the space of café concerts? What other temporalities, spaces, and narratives are possible today? Where does community gather to make humor?

Theatrical Maps of Buenos Aires: Survey, Cartography, and Dérives past the Theaters of the City

2025-09-09T22:15:37+00:00

This essay surveys and maps theaters in the City of Buenos Aires, those that remain and those that do not. We map and present them together as part of the same history, memory, and performance tradition. Based in new cultural geography, we stress the fundamental importance of the urban past to an understanding of the present, and recognize it as a terrain in continuous symbolic and social reconstruction. For this reason, we analyze two instances of dérives (and their respective affective maps of the Microcentro and Abasto neighborhoods) in which the immaterial theatrical past became, at the same time, permanent. The dérive is a theoretical-practical and political tool, capable of providing other possible collective narratives about the urbanscape. It allows us to inhabit the territories that surround us in a non-neutral way, to look at and navigate the city again, to analyze and recognize past disputes and hegemonies that have emerged within the public space, and to attend to more current figurations of urban and national patrimony. In this way, the dérive, the map, and patrimony become the analytical basis for the following articulation of memory that is theatrical, urban, and up-to-date.

Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships

2025-09-09T22:15:38+00:00

This article provides a brief overview of the discourse on the relationships between the arts and media over the twentieth century, with specific reference to the concepts of mediality: multi-, trans- and intermediality set in discourse of arts and media relationships. I discuss the concepts, together with the impact of the growth of media technological developments, on the perception of audiences to the works of Wagner, Kandinsky, Meyerhold, Balázs, Eisenstein, Brecht, and to contemporary theatre and performance-makers, before concluding with a short presentation of my own current thinking about the concept and purpose of intermediality.

F@ust vers. 3.0: A (Hi)story of Theatre and Media

2025-09-09T22:15:38+00:00

The article illuminates Goethe’s Faust (1 and 2) by tracing the theoretical conceptualization of an intermedial approach to theatre and performance, and argues for a historical dimension to the medial constitution of perception. While Goethe used the Faust-legend in his play to highlight two competitive orders of knowledge and media by presenting, on the one hand, the romantic, electric, and Mephistotelian ways of seeing and, on the other hand, the classic, literal and scientific order of knowledge; the Catalan theatre group Fura dels Baus transfer this conflict to the digital age in their remediation of the Faust-legend on the contemporary stage.

Cuadernos de Picadero, XXI, 45. Caja de herramientas. Teatro para las infancias y adolescencias.

2025-09-09T22:15:39+00:00