Teatro Ojo/Hector Bourges/Patricio Villareal: Disorganizing Mimesis
Saturday, 03/10/2018 – 07:30 pm –
MDC Live Arts Lab
300 NE 2nd Avenue, Building 1,
Miami, Florida 33132

Cost: Free

The Mexico City-based group Teatro Ojo essays the possible dispositions and sequences of gestures, images, and machinations that sketch tensions within the texture of a “spectral contract” on which the figure of the Mexican nation-state is incessantly organized and disorganized—a contract plagued by “public secrets”: what we all know and yet we cannot utter. Bourges states the following about Disorganizing Mimesis: “Five images of a radical theatricality: a flayed/flayer god; a talking cross that incites a silent indigenous uprising that lasted a hundred years; a skeleton of the last Aztec emperor made from the bones of birds, deer, dogs, and a woman’s skull; the corpse of Emperor Montezuma talks to his people through a sinister act of ventriloquism; Subcomandante Marcos is unmasked by the Mexican government in 1995…and he turns out to be the son of a furniture dealer.”
Made up of Héctor Bourges, Karla Rodríguez, Patricio Villarreal, Laura Furlan, Gisela Cortés, and Emanuel Bourges, Teatro Ojo was founded in 2002 in Mexico City, where they still live and work. Their practice has shifted from conventionally theatrical territory to an expanded field that includes artworks, performances, and urban interventions. Collaborating with artists Santiago Sierra, Melanie Smith, Mario Bellatín, Juan José Gurrola, and others, the group questions ideas of memory, the city, violence, community, modernity, education, pre-language, and the post-human. Teatro Ojo’s most important projects include the installation Xipe Tótec, Ponte en Mi Pellejo (Put Yourself in My Shoes), at the 2012 Belluard Bollwerk International Festival, Fribourg, Switzerland, and Lo Que Viene (Forthcoming), a stage project at El Galeón Theater, INBA, Mexico City, also in 2012. Teatro Ojo’s work was also included in group exhibitions in 2014 at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid and at the Alhóndiga in Bilbao. In 2011, Teatro Ojo received the gold medal for best Theater Architecture and Performance Space in the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space.
Teatro Ojo is part of Living Together, a cross-disciplinary series of performance art, film and video screenings, talks, and workshops held in venues across the greater Miami area and reflecting the cultural, social, and political realities of how we live now.