Alberto Cortés

Invited to perform his work in France for the first time, the Andalusian director and performance artist Alberto Cortés, tells the story of a tormented spirit that manifests itself in natural environments. Bearing the scars of its many wounds, this spirt is driven by the desire to heal toxic relationships. The author and performer uses this story as a means to explore intra-gender violence and to highlight the dire need to take radical care of each other in queer relationships, the weight of their patriarchal heritage still weighing down heavily upon them. Drawing on his own experience, Alberto Cortés fully embraces being "irrational", a label which was once used as an insult to him. Taking his inspiration from José Bergamín's La decadencia del analfabetismo, his piece casts a critical eye on a society that sacrifices poets in the name of a rational order in which everything must be clearly visible, orderly, readable and fixed — just like the alphabet itself. Ranging from cruising to poetry, Analphabet sets out to save a world in constant threat of an excess of light. Although wounded and half-dead, the arrival of the ghost brings hope, that of what poetry can offer the wounded.