Oligor y Microscopía (Spain-Mexico)
LA MÁQUINA DE LA SOLEDAD
12 to 15 August at 9.30pm (Wed to Sat)
15 August at 7pm (Sat)
Tickets: 8€ / 6€ (if you buy 3 or more tickets for the shows at Teatro do Bairro). +info
Portuguese Premiere FIMFA Lx15
Technique: Documentary object theatre Language: Spanish For audiences over: +12 Running time: 80 min.
A suitcase full of love letters from 1900, found in Mexico, unfolds the story of a couple, Manuel and Elisa.
La Máquina de la Soledad [The Loneliness Machine] is a tribute to postal mail and letters as objects.
A fascinating documentary object theatre.
From a suitcase full of love letters from 1900, found in Mexico, unfolds the story of a couple, Manuel and Elisa, two people who are between fiction and reality. With an exceptional delicacy, La Máquina de la Soledad presents itself as a great small format show. Following many years of research, a device was born that creates small fragments of the world and takes us in a journey through the mechanisms of memory.
La Máquina de la Soledad is a tribute to postal mail and letters as objects. This machine is an amplification of an instant created with precarious, diminutive, invisible technology, activated each time there is ink in the hands, in front of a sheet of paper, with a distance and an absence. Its engines are memories contained in each recovered letter, with stories of life in Mexico and Spain, featuring the archaeology of unusual objects, images and stories taken from writers, retired postmen, post office workers and files.
The Machine is a defoliated document in a space of micro-landscapes and inventories revealing negligible affections that protect the document and the matter. The machine accumulates events in multiple formats (texts, videos, photos, documents, interviews, testimonies), which then are translated to a small scale and that stress the importance of ageing of the matter. In this case the field of forces of the object-letter.
Jomi Oligor, from Hermanos Oligor (Spain) and Shaday Larios, from Microscopía Teatro (Mexico), presented La Máquina de la Soledad at FIMFA Lx15, a show that remained in the public's memory and the first project of this duo of artists. A tale of love, an intimate, almost secret space, coming from the other side of the ocean and where all worlds are still possible. An emotional journey, full of sensations, not to be missed!
The future of museums is inside our homes.
-Orham Pamuk
"A wonderful documentary on epistolary relations, currently on the verge of extinction, and a museum where objects speak, to tell us the story of their former owners. Sometimes it may seem like a fiction, but La Máquina de la Soledad is a true documentary. Shaday and Jomi attest the love story between Manuel and Elisa.”
-Javier Vallejo, El País
"La Máquina de la Soledad was for me a fundamental discovery to understand more deeply the poetics that objects contain."
-Mariana Romero, Magazine Absurdo
BIO
Two companies that FIMFA has presented and whose work has been following since. Hermanos Oligor is a company dedicated to the poetics of objects which was created on the basis of the mythical show called Las Tribulaciones de Virginia, presented with great success at FIMFA in 2005 and 2010. Microscopía Teatro is a Mexican laboratory group for stage research that works with atmospheres of the intimate through objects, models, furniture, toys, mechanisms and shadows. It also implements schemes for social inclusion and stage philosophy through the values of miniaturization and the dissociative powers of the theatre of objects. Shaday Larios and Jomi Oligor, the two spirits of Oligor and Microscopía, started working together in 2013, after meeting at a festival in São Paulo and realising their work was following parallel paths. They both shared a particular interest for objects, memory, miniatures and fragility. Jomi and Shaday went into partnership to explore the documentary possibilities of the subject matter. Combining an artistic view with a more reflective dimension they have worked together on projects such as La Máquina de la Soledad, also presented very successfully at FIMFA Lx15 (2015). In association with the Catalan artist Xavier Bobés they also founded ‘El Solar. Agencia de Detectives de Objetos’.
CREDITS
Creation, construction and performers: Shaday Larios, Jomi Oligor Coproduction: Oligor y Microscopía, Centre d’Arts Escèniques de Terrassa, Iberescena Photography: Oligor y Microscopía, Alípio Padilha With the collaboration of: La Máquina de Teatro Acknowledgements: To the writters Edit, Elvira and Lourdes, Manuel and Elisa, Javier and his mother, David and Anita, Ivan Puig, Marcela Armas, David Continente, Catalina Juárez, Dalia Huerta and Bindu, Xabi Bobés, Jordi Fondevila, Jordà Ferré, Iazua Larios, Rober, Calandria, Claudio and Charo, Lirio and Martí, Anselmo and María, Cabo San Roque, Rinoceronte Enamorado and all the anonymous people who have somehow ended up in drawers and small boxes of La Máquina de la Soledad