CVC: Lola Arias Lecture “Theater as a Remake of the Past”

Lecture: Lola Arias “Theater as a Remake of the Past”
Monday, March 15, 2021 12:00pm CDT Zoom Webinar, https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/92742151177.

Both events are free and open to the public. They are possible thanks to the generous financial support of the Anonymous Fund and the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program (LACIS). The Center for Visual Cultures would also like to thank Art, Art History, Gender and Women’s Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium, Spanish and Portuguese, Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, Center for Humanities, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities.

Lecture:
Can art be a way to revive the past? How do reality and fiction overlap? What can we understand under the expression documentary art? What kind of writing processes enable these types of projects? In which ways is a play a living and autonomous organism?

Through videos and materials of her works, the Argentinian director Lola Arias offers a videoconference talk about her experience in the field of documentary art and interdisciplinary projects using theatre, film and visual arts in the last decade. Arias will approach different aspects of the genesis and development of her works, where she problematizes the relationship between aesthetics and politics, reality and fiction, art work and social experiment.

Biography:
Lola Arias (Argentina, 1976) is a writer, theatre and film director. She is a multifaceted artist whose work brings together people from different backgrounds (war veterans, former communists, migrant children, etc.) in theatre, film, literature, music and visual art projects.

Arias’ productions play with the overlap between reality and fiction. “Sitting in the theatre, wandering a site-specific location or watching a film, we are inculcated into others’ narratives, wound into their complexities, joys and disappointments. At the same time, we are also invited and at times confronted, in an extraordinary and acute way, to reflect on the contingencies and fragilities of our own stories, individual and collective, as well as on our shifting, unresolved relation to the precarious and dangerous machinery that is social and political history.” (Etchells, in Re-enacting Life, 2019).
Link to Lola Aria’s website.