Agustina Muñoz – Residency at La Becque [CH]

For the past few years, Agustina Muñoz [AR] has worked on language, voice, and collective speech. She investigates the stage as a mental space where the absent, the “no-longer”, and the lost can exist in the here and now, shared with and within the contemporary bodies of performers and the audience.

This includes lost indigenous languages, lost books, and fragments of texts that have survived various historical threats. She has worked with various layers of knowledge and sources underpinning the historical lines and chronologies that build up our experience of the present, from medieval tales to religious gospels, biology texts of birds adapted to life in big cities and descriptions of southern constellations by European travellers in the 16th century.

Her project for a residency at La Becque [CH], in 2020, addressed 18th and 19th-century texts by European travellers (mostly women) in South America that depict nature and indigenous life, the twofold character of the adventurer and the settler, the traveller and the conqueror, and how language brings back a landscape and a life that exist no more.

Agustina created some videos during the residency, crossing text with images of old paintings and drawings of South American landscapes of the 17th and 18th-century. Also, she did some research and wrote first drafts of a possible text, that was later tested, during open studios, with teenage performers from a local high school.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Agustina Muñoz [AR], a native of Buenos Aires, develops her work in the fields of cinema and performing arts. Addressing notions of corporeality, desire, heritage, and memory, her approach to text unfolds through writing, directing, and solo as well as collective stage plays. Rewarded with several dramaturgy prizes, she had projects featured in theatres and art centres in Argentina, Spain, Chile, the Netherlands, and Cuba.