Laida Azkona Goñi / Txalo Toloza-Fernández Pacífico
Extranos mares arden | Tierras del Sud | Teatro Amazonas

[Theatre]

The duo formed by performers Azkona and Toloza brings us its Pacífico trilogy, initiated in 2014. The piece consists of three shows, recounting three stories of capitalism, neo-colonialism, and its consequences, in Chile, Argentina and Brazil. Drawing upon a blend of narrative, choreography, music and the visual arts, the duo turn documentary theatre into art of an eminently political nature.

In their Pacífico trilogy, presented for the first time in its entirety, the Spanish-Chilean duo of performers Azkona and Toloza brings us the fruit of a longstanding enquiry-based process exploring relations between capitalism, neo-colonialism and the cultural industry. Each show is devised as a segment within this documentary enquiry, leading them across Chile, Argentina and Brazil successively.
Extraños mares arden (2014) interweaves the history of the Guggenheim family with that of the Atacama desert, and shows the historical links between the mining industry and contemporary art. Following the thread of the story, and via a series of actions carried out by the performers, the stage is transformed before our eyes, from contemporary art gallery to desert-like landscape. In Tierras del Sud (2018), a mountainous landscape progressively takes shape onstage. The show follows in the footsteps of the Benetton brothers, up to the encounter with the lands owned by the Mapuche, in Patagonia, and puts into words the expropriation of the indigenous populations. Narrative, dance, music and images are used to recount the violence with which the Argentine state has treated its autochthonous peoples and their lands. The last segment, Teatro Amazonas, created in 2020, looks into two of Brazil’s major architectural sites, the opera and the Manaus stadium. It focusses on the story of the various transformations of the Brazilian Amazon, caught between industrial boom, colonial culture and indigenous culture.
Underpinned by an enquiry-based approach, at the crossroads between history and ethnography, and via an interdisciplinary artistic practice, the shows in the trilogy explore the possibilities of documentary theatre. In doing so, they invent an original form of political art, which unravels, before the audience’s eyes, the complex history of Latin America.