Mapa teatro
Mapa Teatro is a laboratory for artistic experimentation and transdisciplinary creation, directed by sister and brother Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden, theater and visual artists from Colombia. Since its founding in 1983, this laboratory has focused on the live arts, a form of thought-creation that emerges from affect, understood as the impact of vital forces of an environment on the body.
Renowned for its ability to transgress geographical, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries, Mapa Teatro pushes the traditional limits of theatricality. This is evident in the hybridizations they make between the body and various disciplines such as the performing and visual arts, music, film, architecture, literature, philosophy and anthropology.
Through its laboratories, Mapa Teatro produces a wide array of artistic expressions, such as theatrical performances, radio and sound pieces, installations, performative actions, operas, cinematic cabarets, and urban interventions, among others. This versatility contributes to a rich poetic-political cartography, where myth, history, fiction, and contemporary events continuously intersect and intertwine, blending the public with the intimate, the simulacrum with reality, and the document with fiction.
The exhibition Mapa Teatro – Laboratory of Social Imagination presents a carefully curated selection of works, organized in four modules: The Witnesses, Atlas, Anatomy of Violence, and Trans/Migrations. This selection highlights fundamental aspects of the poetic pluriverse that Mapa Teatro has developed over four decades: an experimental field that constantly revisits questions of aesthetics, ethics, micropolitics, poetics, theatricality, and performativity. Echoing the words of playwright Heiner Müller, who said, “theater is a laboratory of social imagination,” Mapa Teatro, through its laboratories with temporary communities, stretches the arc between life and art: the political power of imagination.
Carolina Ponce de León
Curator
Horacio
Video archive of the stage production of the same name
Camarín del Carmen, Bogotá, 1994.
Between 1993 and 1994, Mapa Teatro conducted a creative laboratory at La Picota Central Penitentiary in Bogotá, based on the text Horacio by German playwright Heiner Müller. What was initially planned as a three-month exploration of the figures of the hero and the assassin evolved into a year-long experience, extending beyond the prison walls to public performances at the IV Ibero-American Theater Festival.
The ethical, aesthetic, and political questions raised by this experience deepened fundamental concepts in Mapa Teatro’s practice: the laboratories of social imagination and live arts. These concepts, rooted in affect—understood as the impact of vital ecosystem forces on the body (Rolnik)—and the engagement with real-life actors, the witnesses in presence, form the foundation of their transdisciplinary approach.
Prometheus, Acts I and II (2002-2003)
Photographic archive (2023)
Collection of the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia -MAMU, Banco de la República, Bogotá
Prometheus steals fire from the gods to give it to humans. In response, the gods punish him by condemning him to exile in the Caucasus, where he is chained to a rock, and an eagle feeds daily on his liver. In turn, Prometheus feeds on the eagle’s excrement, sustaining a cycle that ensures both his survival and that of the eagle.
Between 2002 and 2003, Mapa Teatro conducted a thought-creation laboratory with twelve inhabitants of the Santa Inés-El Cartucho neighborhood, resulting in a performative action and on site installation during the demolition (Prometheus, Act I), and later, on its ruins (Prometheus, Act II).
Mapa Teatro accompanied this temporary experimental community through the personal and collective experience of the neighborhood’s disappearance due to an urban renewal project, from the demolition process to the construction of Tercer Milenio Park in its place.
Drawing on Heiner Müller’s text The Liberation of Prometheus, the inhabitants wove new narratives from legend, memory, and dreams. These three elements allowed each participant to reconstruct their own fragment of the neighborhood, collectively creating a possible architecture of memory for El Cartucho.
Los Santos Inocentes [The Holy Innocents]
Photographic archive, variation (2023)
Mapa Teatro explores the theatricalization of violence in Colombia through an annual event in Guapi, Cauca. Every December 28, masked men dressed in women’s clothing and accessories roam the streets, whipping anyone who crosses their path without a mask. This festivity, which can be seen as a transgression, a collective catharsis, a nightmare, or a paramilitary massacre, exposes the complex dynamics of violence and power in Colombian society. Although real, this event takes on the form of fiction, revealing the underlying mechanisms of violence.
Exxxtrañas Amazonas
Video installation, 2022
Exxxtrañas Amazonas is a video installation that acts as a variation of a “Martian operetta” of the same name, first presented as an exercise in live cinema in 2007. It is a remake of the Mexican science fiction film Blue Demon y las mujeres invasoras (1969), one of the best “worst” Mexican sci-fi films. In this reinterpretation by Mapa Teatro, three Colombian transformists—Linda Lucía Callejas, Charlotte Sneider, and Amada Rosa (R.I.P.)—take on the roles of the film’s protagonists. As they interact with the projected film, they fictionalize the narrative and, through their performance, create friction within the science fiction genre and challenge the construction of gender as a tool for producing subjectivity.
Produced by Churrebusque Producciones, Mapa Teatro’s film production company.
Dear Heidi:
Your project seems very interesting to me and aligns perfectly with many of the inquiries of the avant-garde as well as simple social taste. Regarding the films, any wrestling movie is profoundly terrible, yet at the same time, brilliant if shown in fragments. Perhaps La nave de los monstruos is the most delirious, although, in my opinion, nothing surpasses—or could surpass—the horrifying and prodigious Santo contra las mujeres vampiro. But I must insist: whatever you choose will be unbeatable, because in this genre, functional illiteracy and a complete lack of imagination have achieved a kind of miracle.
If you need more information, I am at your service.
Best regards,
Carlos MonsiváisMexico City, 2007
Project 24
Video performance
LA/LA Project, Los Angeles County Museum of Art – LACMA, 2017
Project 24 is an audiovisual variation of the installation/performance of the same name, reflecting Mapa Teatro’s interest in exploring shifting architectures, ruins, and displacement, and examining the tensions between exhibition devices and theatrical staging. In 2017, the Getty Institute and LACMA invited Mapa Teatro to participate in the LA/LA project with an on site creation laboratory. For this project, Mapa Teatro selected the museum’s Paleontology Laboratory, where they imagined and constructed a fictional narrative based on the staff’s daily activities, such as collecting, cleaning, and cataloging objects. Mapa Teatro contributed artifacts that could belong to a ruined theater buried beneath the museum: a crystal tear, a yellow velvet curtain, a key from a musical instrument, and an archive of letters and audiovisual records. Project 24 fictionalizes an archaeological process to explore these ruins, revealing intersections between memory, history, and fiction through filmic imagery.
Hotel Atlanta
Phantasmagoria for video and sound, 2022
Since 2000, Mapa Teatro has occupied an old republican manor on Carrera Séptima, in the heart of Bogotá. Conceded by artist Rafael Ortiz, the house has served as Mapa Teatro’s artistic residence and as the home for its creation laboratories, resident artists, and guest thinkers. It has also been a venue for academic gatherings and international platforms such as Experimenta/Sur and the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Theater and Live Arts at the National University of Colombia.
Hotel Atlanta is Mapa Teatro’s tribute to this house, which, over its forty years of existence, once operated as the Hotel Atlanta boarding house. This homage also celebrates Atlanta, the house’s guardian dog, and all the people who have lived there for more than a century. It also acknowledges the ghosts, remnants, and creative forces that have contributed to the thought and creation nurtured in this space.
The Moon in the Amazon. Index 1: La Tuerca
Film Archive, 2019
With the wind of imperialism in its sails, Western culture emerges under the banner of science to inspect and subjugate the world. Expedition. Expansion. Ethnology. The planet’s inhabitants are classified and exploited. Ecology. Economy. Eco-trauma. The expansionist drive is infinite, but Earth’s resources are not. In 1969, Apollo 11 flies to the moon, but the moon is in the Amazon. In times of colonial expansion, radical resistance means disappearance.
Based on the existence of an indigenous people who survive in total isolation, Mapa Teatro creates an ethnofiction process. Eighteen heterogeneous tracks will unfold over a year, exploring visibility, vulnerability, and fiction from a postcolonial perspective. The first track is based on the memories of a ‘guaquero’ who dangerously approaches isolated indigenous people in search of treasures. Tales of shamans, explorers, rumors, and forensic findings are some of the tracks that materialize the invisible. Mapa Teatro invites exploration of history’s blind spots, creating a hologram that seems tangible but disappears upon closer inspection.
Los Incontados [The Uncounted]
Installation, 2018
Variation of The Uncounted: A Triptych, stage production, XIV Ibero-American Theater Festival of Bogotá (2014)
Collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (2018)
The unburied,
uncounted, up there,
the children,
are ready to leap—Paul Celan
In various places and times, fiestas and celebrations have been infiltrated by conflict actors through different forms of camouflage. In Colombia, these events have become a prime stage for the eruption of war. For decades, celebrations and festivities in their different forms have been transformed and used as devices to celebrate not just life, but also death.
The Uncounted: A Triptych is the third stage production in the Anatomy of Violence cycle. A children’s brass band plays martial tunes in the absence of the children; a radio broadcasts educational programs from Radio Sutatenza while a slogan is repeatedly voiced by Father Camilo Torres, all enveloped in the smoke from a magician at a children’s party that never happened—or from a nightmare that has already passed. This space, filled with traces and remnants of a celebration, reveals the fragile boundary between celebration and violence that has permeated Colombia’s history over the past sixty years.
Los Santos Inocentes [The Holy Innocents]
Variation of The Innocent Saints, installation (Gothenburg Biennial, Sweden, 2014)
The stage production of The Holy Innocents inaugurated the Anatomy of Violence triptych in 2010. In 2009, Mapa Teatro witnessed with astonishment the December celebrations of The Holy Innocents in Guapi (Cauca), on Colombia’s Pacific coast. Every December 28th, masked men dressed in women’s clothing roam the streets, whipping those who cross their path without a mask. Men, women, adults, and children, mostly of Afro-descendant heritage, try to escape or avoid the lashes, though intriguingly, many of them throw themselves to the ground to receive them. Drawing from this experience, where the collective celebration acts as a counter-device of resistance to violence, Mapa Teatro presents a living archive that each visitor reactivates by placing their own body within the space of ethnofiction.
Variation III on The Holy Innocents
Automaton, 2015
Work commissioned by MDE15, International Art Encounter of Medellín (2015)
This variation stems from the work Mapa Teatro began in 2009 on the celebration of The Holy Innocents, a popular celebration held annually on Colombia’s Pacific coast. In this festivity, masked Afro-descendant men, dressed in women’s clothing, take to the streets to whip those without a mask. The act of wearing a mask and the transgression of gender and class unmask the history of slavery, racialization, and economic and social discrimination, questioning the normalization and persistence of historical violence, as well as the emergence of new forms of colonization in the country. In this variation, an automaton, crafted with Colombian artisanal technology, indefinitely repeats the action, reiterating the ancestral experience marked in its body: the scar of history’s whip.
Discurso de un hombre decente [Discourse of a Decent Man]
Archive of a speculative fiction
Spoken World Festival, Brussels, 2010
Based on an alleged political speech found in the shirt pocket of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar on the day of his death, Mapa Teatro created Discourse of a Decent Man, the second section of the triptych Anatomy of Violence in Colombia (2010-2015). This “fake” speech, composed entirely of public statements and interviews by Escobar, was allegedly classified as top secret by the CIA in 1993 and transformed by Mapa Teatro into microfilm, later becoming a declassified archive. In its stage version, the speech is projected in the presence of real actors—an expert on drug trafficking and violence, a hip-hop musician from Medellín, and a band that lived through the golden age of drug trafficking and suffered one of its attacks—alongside fictional figures, such as a delirious journalist and a coca plant. This paradoxical ethnofiction critiques the costly and failed war on drugs and reignites the debate on its legalization in Colombia.
Akulliku
Video and sound installation, 2013
Work commissioned by Wiener Festwochen, Kunstmuseum (Vienna)
During the 56th Session of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs in 2013, Bolivian President Evo Morales defended the coca leaf as a sacred plant used by the indigenous peoples of the continent for thousands of years. Morales celebrated the international community’s support for the traditional consumption of the coca leaf, interpreting it as a triumph against imperialism. However, the U.N. maintained that the coca leaf remains a controlled substance. As the top leader of the coca growers in the Chapare region, Morales led celebrations in Cochabamba and La Paz to mark Bolivia’s return to the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, with an exception applied to his country allowing coca chewing or akulliku.
Akulliku is a variation of the ethnofiction Discourse of a Decent Man (2013). The images come from a trip by Heidi Abderhalden and Pierre-Henri Magnin to the coca plantations in the Cochabamba region of Bolivia, where Evo Morales is from.
La Despedida [The Farewell]
Archive-installation, 2024
Variation of the stage production The Farewell, 2017
The Farewell, an ethnofiction, is based on the conversion of El Borugo, a former FARC-EP camp, into a “living museum” following the signing of the 2016 peace agreements in Colombia. This former guerrilla camp, opened to the press as an ethnographic museum, exhibits the icons, practices, and ways of life of the “armed rebels.” The peace agreement with the FARC not only ended a half-century-long armed conflict but also inaugurated a new battle: the war of memories.
The stage production, first presented in 2017, unfolds in a plot of equatorial jungle, displaying the remnants of a farewell party. Among the vestiges of war, such as rifles, confiscated uniforms, communication antennas, and revolutionary music, traces of a grand dance are found. The heroes of the revolution appear as statues in a “communist time capsule,” symbolizing the end of one era and the beginning of another.
The Farewell not only exposes the physical remnants of the conflict but also challenges the official narrative of the military forces, offering a reflection on the multiple layers of memory and meaning in Colombia’s recent history. Mapa Teatro invites spectators to contemplate the processes of memory, forgetting, war, and peace that shape the social and political fabric of the country from multiple perspectives.
Trans/Migrations (Work in Progress)
Living Archive, 2024
Social Imagination Laboratory
This original and ongoing work emerges from the encounter with Abby, a Venezuelan trans woman who owns a religious goods store near the Museo de Antioquia. Abby inspires Mapa Teatro to explore the migratory journeys of a transgender body in search of geographical, economic, bodily, emotional, and spiritual refuge. Surrounded by non-traditional religious figures, canonized by popular mythology, these outlaw saints continue to protect their most vulnerable devotees after transcending to the spiritual realm.
In the coming months, Mapa Teatro will present the processes of this laboratory in the Cundinamarca North galleries, tracing and accompanying Abby’s dissident body through her gender transition, guided by her cortege of apocryphal saints. Here, Mapa Teatro addresses micropolitical aspects related to the transits and migrations of beliefs.
The laboratory will explore performative, bodily, visual, and sound gestures of identities in transit, involved in trans/migrations as they cross borders: between the normative and the dissident, national identity and foreignness, body and gender, and between the politics of domination and sexual freedom. By focusing on these gestures, Mapa Teatro offers a poetic cartography to explore and make these experiences visible, understanding each transmigration as a micropolitical act of reinvention and resistance.
