A Text is a Pure Image. Correspondence Around Mapa Teatro

Abstract

This document is constructed as an exchange of letters between actor Agnes Brekke and writer and theatre scholar Giulia Palladini, reflecting on their common long-term engagement with the Colombian artistic laboratory Mapa Teatro. The exchange took place in summer 2022 and a shorter version was published in Spanish in the catalogue of the exhibition Mapa Teatro: Laboratory of Social Imagination, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the company’s work in the expanded field of artes vivas. The text proposes a meditation on Mapa Teatro’s work discussing examples from specific pieces, and a reflection on ways to think and write with/alongside/through theatre. It also explores questions of collective work, authorship, thinking through creation, and the relation between images and texts on stage.

Acknowledgements

A shorter version of this piece was first published in Spanish in the exhibition catalogue Mapa Teatro: Laboratorio de la imaginación social 40 años, (Bogotà, Banco de la Republica, 2022) edited by Carolina Ponce de León. We thank Mapa Teatro and Carolina Ponce de León for the permission to build upon that version and publish it here in English.

Notes

1. Rolf Adberhalden, ‘¿Artes Vivas?’, El Heraldo, October 19, 2014, https://revistas.elheraldo.co/latitud/artes-vivas-132326 (accessed April 20, 2023).

2. Rolf and Heidi Adberhalden, ‘Testigos/Witnesses’, in Lexicon for an Affective Archive, eds. Giulia Palladini and Marco Pustianaz (Bristol: Intellect), 137–142.

3. Carolina Ponce de León, ‘Nota de la editora’, in Mapa Teatro: Laboratorio de la imaginación social 40 años, exhibition catalogue, ed. Carolina Ponce de León (Bogotá: Banco de la Republica, 2022), 10. The sentence echoes words by playwright August Strindberg.

4. In using the words ‘affects’ and ‘affections’, I wish to echo Suely Rolnik deployment of these terms, based on a profound distinction between affect and emotions. Affect, in Suely’s terms, is not a psychological state, but a vital emotion, pointing at a bodily experience. See Suely Rolnik, ‘A la escucha de los afectos: notas para combatir el inconsciente colonial-capitalistico’, lecture presented in the MA in Artes Vivas, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, 2014: http://artes.bogota.unal.edu.co/assets/programas-academicos/docs/posgrado/maestria/teatro-artes-vivas/produccion/suely-rolnik.pdf (accessed May 17, 2023)

5. For a description of the show, see Mapa Teatro’s website: https://www.mapateatro.org/en/cartography/discourse-decent-man (accessed May 18, 2023).

6. For a description of the show The Moon is in the Amazon, see Mapa Teatro’s website: https://www.mapateatro.org/en/cartography/moon-amazon (accessed May 18, 2023).

7. For a description of the show The Leaving Party, see Mapa Teatro’s website: https://www.mapateatro.org/en/cartography/leaving-party (accessed May 18, 2023).

8. For a description of the show The Holy Innocents, see Mapa Teatro’s website: https://www.mapateatro.org/en/cartography/holy-innocents (accessed on May 18, 2023)

9. For a description of the show The Unaccounted: a Triptych, see Mapa Teatro’s website: https://www.mapateatro.org/en/cartography/unaccounted-triptych

10. Bertolt Brecht, Me-ti. The Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things, trans, Anthony Tatlow (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

11. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., trans. Idra Novey (London: Penguin, 2012), 3–4.

12. Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2008), 153.

13. Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, trans. Alison Entrekin (New York: New Directions, 2012), 23.

14. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 320.

15. See my idea of ‘domestics’ in Giulia Palladini, ‘On Coexisting, Mending and Imagining:Notes on the Domestics of Performance’, in A Live Gathering: Performance and Politics in Contemporary Europe, eds. Ana Vujanovic, Livia Andrea Piazza (Berlin: b_books, 2019), 106–130.

16. Anna Klobucka, ‘Hélène Cixous and the Hour of Clarice Lispector’, SubStance 23, No. 1, Issue 73 (1994): 41–62.

17. Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978–1979 and 1979–1980) trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

18. This is a fragment from The Moon is in the Amazon, spoken by Agnes Brekke and Heidi Abderhalden. The questions are liberally elaborated from quotes from the book: David Lapoujade, The Lesser Existences (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

19. From the show The Moon is in the Amazon, spoken by Agnes Brekke and Heidi Abderhalden. The questions are liberally elaborated from quotes from Lapoujade, The Lesser Existences.

20. from the show The Moon is in the Amazon, spoken by Agnes Brekke and Heidi Abderhalden. The questions are liberally elaborated from quotes from Lapoujade, The Lesser Existences.

21. Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘On the Frontier’, in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (Boulder, Shambala Publications, 2004), 28–30.

22. Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, 288.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giulia Palladini

Giulia Palladini is a writer and critical theorist. Her work moves between different languages, and fields of knowledge, exploring practices of production and reproduction in art and social life. She writes about pleasure and labor, domestics and politics, archives and political resistance. She is an Alexander von Humboldt alumna, worked as Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton in London (where she is currently Honorary Research Fellow) and at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee in Germany. She has collaborated in critical and artistic projects, and presented her work in various international contexts. She was Visiting Professor in various institutions, such as the National University of Colombia, the University of Cuenca, Bern University of the Arts. She is the author of The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York (2017) and co-editor (with Marco Pustianaz) of Lexicon for an Affective Archive (2017). In 2021, she led the research cluster ‘Feminismos Antipatriarcales and Poetic Disobedience’ (UK/MX/Ecuador/Brazil). In 2024, she is curating two art projects: ‘Antidotes: encounters to think live arts in the political landscape’ (Centro de Cultura Digital, Ciudad de México) and ‘Rumbos de vida’, within ‘Stills of Peace’ (Fondazione Aria, Atri, Italy).

Agnes Brekke

Agnes Brekke is a Colombo-Norwegian actress, born in England and brought up in Colombia. She has an MA in Theatre and Performance Arts from Colombia’s National University (2015) and a BA degree in European Theatre Arts from Rose Bruford College (2003). She won the ‘actress of the year’ prize at the Oval House Theatre in London in 2007, and has played leading roles for the BBC Worldwide Service and Channel 4 Radio. Agnes was a member of the Bottlefed Ensemble in the UK until moving back to Colombia in 2012, where she has since joined Mapa Teatro as lead actress together with Heidi Abderhalden. With Mapa Teatro, she performed in: “Discourse of a Decent Man”, “The Holy Innocent”, “The Unaccounted”, “The Farewell” and “The Moon in the Amazon”. Agnes also works as a teacher: for the past 9 years she has been a core teacher and coordinator in the Drama Program at the El Bosque University, from 2013 to 2015 she taught acting to opera students, directed operas and plays, and worked as a leader and facilitator in a project between the Ministry of Culture and the ICBF (Colombian Family Welfare Institute) in juvenile detention centres across Colombia 2015/2016. In 2023, Agnes was awarded the Scholar in Residence Fulbright scholarship, with which she spent the second half of 2023 teaching theatre at the Metropolitan Community College in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.