André Braga & Cláudia Figueiredo
“The fire only stopped when there was nothing left to burn.”
After more than a year, time passed almost without leaving the same place. Looks like it was yesterday. “The fire still burns outside so many times, the room burns night after night, it fills up with smoke”.
Luto is a transdisciplinary project, for outdoor spaces, created during an artistic residence in Tábua, Taking as starting point the fire of October 15, 2017, one of the biggest megafires in Europe, Luto focuses on the issues of trauma and catastrophe.
The double meaning of the term ‘luto’, as a process of mourning, dealing with loss – of human lives, memories, physical spaces – and as the verb fight – resilience and commitment of populations and nature to imagine other futures –, was the nuclear motto that structured our thinking and areas to address. The testimonies collected both in loco and from various documentary sources were our starting material, but it soon became clear what we were interested in revealing: the dimensions that go beyond the local sphere of the fire and that are somehow common to various times and places. The extreme violence of the fire and the general sensation of being at the verge of apocalypse could only make us pose the question somewhere at the eminence of the End, when it becomes clear the urgency of a new philosophy, a new thought, a radically different political being.
DOSSIER TEASER ITINERANCY PRESS
“The word ‘catastrophe’ comes from the Greek and literally means ‘face down’.
By definition, catastrophe is an event that causes trauma, another Greek word, which means ‘injury’.
Catastrophe, trauma and memory relate to each other in those stories that cannot be captured by thought or speech. What comes up are fragments, shards of memory. The unspeakable can only be unspoken, and ‘remembering’ can be a way of ‘forgetting’, of normalizing the past.” Nestrovski and M. Seligmann-Silva
Direction: André Braga
Dramaturgy: Cláudia Figueiredo with the support from Gonçalo Mota
Co-creation e interpretation: Diogo Martins, Diogo Peres, Gil Mac, Mafalda Saloio, Odete Claro, Paulo Mota, Soraia Cavaco and Valentina Parravicini
Sound modelling: André Pires
Plastic conception: André Braga and Pedro Azevedo
Video: Gonçalo Mota with the support from Vitor Costa
Light: Cláudia Valente
Plastic construction: Pedro Azevedo and Pedro Coutinho
Production: Ana Carvalhosa (direction) with the support from Cláudia Santos and Carolina Cardoso
Project within Rede Artéria, artistic coordination by Teatrão and co-financed by Portugal 20.20.
2019 | 75 minutes | over 12 years-old
