The far right describes its crusade against this living culture, against culture itself, as a cultural war; but it is a war on culture. The far right has always been at war with culture
It is a work against the hipsterization of theater and against the gentrification of themes, plots, issues treated on stage. They are hipsterizing us by leaps and bounds. Otherwise, head to Manifesta, the contemporary art festival taking place this term in Barcelona. It has two great symbols: the three tall chimneys of the Fecsa (which rise above the only part of Barcelona’s coastline that remains unbuilt) and the Casa Gomis, in Can Ricarda (the controversial area where the airport de Prat will be expanded from Llobregat). . There are a lot of people rubbing their hands. They don’t hide it too much either. In the Manifesto they called the part of the exhibitions organized in this area of the coast: Imagining Futures. And they named the role of Can Ricarda Balancing Conflicts.
This type of urban reconversion is carefully recounted in Richard Price’s novel, The easy life (Random House, 2010, trans. Carlos Milla Soler). It is a detective novel which, in its context, explains how the Lower East Side of New York ceased to be a neighborhood of humble people, of people who had fallen on hard times, to become a pure and simple territory of speculation real estate. An open canal neighborhood the same as The skinned ox, of Rembrandt, a quarter made raw to be delivered to its buyers.
First of all, they sent the artists, the bohemians, to occupy the streets and the premises. They are cannon fodder, they put up with everything and make places fashionable. This is called giving visibility. In this, investors are like Jesus Christ, they spit on the ground and use mud to rub the eyes of neighborhoods blind from birth to restore their sight. To give them visibility. Even if seeing is not the same as being visible. What happens through gentrification is that people who no one wanted to see go from being invisible (in India they are called untouchables) to being evicted. It will no longer be necessary to see them, because they are no longer there. Staff have to go to worse places, where life is cheaper. Let them rot away. The land belongs to those who work it, and the soil belongs to those who can pay for it.
For the same reason, the piece Euphoria and disappointment It becomes a plea of blood and fire against the hipsterization of theater and the themes represented there. Because these are people, five characters, who have been excluded from the game. You just have to see them. People who had to invent their own rules of the game in a ruined place, which is their last refuge. Outside of this place, they have nothing left and that is why they cannot escape their confinement. Where to go? The old van without wheels you see from the window? When we can’t pay the rent, when the demolitions come, when everything goes wrong, in apartments like these, in cellars like that, that’s where the most fragile staff end up thrown into the woods (it doesn’t come from rumba, it means abandoned, excluded).
The work Euphoria and disappointment It is currently performed at Sala Beckett in Barcelona. It was written and directed by the Argentine playwright Sergio Boris and is performed by the El Eje company, as well as by other actors who came for the occasion. The mixture of Argentinian, Catalan, Galician ancestors… dynamites space and time. What happened up until the moment the action begins is that Mrs. Laura Velázquez (she does not appear, she is only named) had an academy for adults, where they gave a diploma which seemed not very approved, but perhaps it was useful to get back to life by including it in the school curriculum. One day the owner of the academy took her van to check the wheels, and that’s how the owner of the workshop, Aguilés, ended up with her and occupied her academy for pure survival reasons . Its tires invade everything in silence. The wheels come to the academy like the snow comes L’Éternaut.
Nothing represents the military better than piles of tires. An army, an invasion, is simply that: the emergence of a large number of wheels. The Argentine wound of this work is in this rubber, in these wheels placed on the ground, which have completely invaded the adult academy. The Argentine wound of this work also lies in the sorrow of the characters and in the heartbreaking clothes they wear, which represent the ulcer inflicted on people by economic crises. Do you remember the playpen? Her pustule is Milei. In Spain, it’s also like that. But we call them invisible, we call them the invisible neighborhoods, like the blind who call invisible what they do not see.
Ms. Laura is no longer at the academy as she was transported from the emergency room to San Camilo Hospital. In Spain, well, no one remembers it anymore, the day of San Camilo is our biggest wound, San Camilo is July 18. Mrs. Laura had become very ill because she had been poisoned by sniffing the tire sealant. He had become addicted to smelling it, like all the characters in the play. This addiction, this illness, this rottenness appeared as the wheels appeared. It came from outside, it came from space, strange and cursed, just like the meteorite from The color falling from the sky, in Lovecraft’s story. Joining this queue are fat Aguilés (Sebastián Mogordoy) and his brother Carlos (Eric Balbàs), the boy responsible, in other words, for the maintenance of the academy’s facilities. Two survivors, the characters. Two great actors, the performers. Everything that is defeated for Aguilés is impotence for Carlos. Defeats are always heavy, they always weigh too much, others always have to wipe their asses. Impotence manifests itself pathetically when we speak, it shows itself openly before us when we can only speak with ready-made phrases, second-hand words, with those hackneyed assertions that we make to protest and say here I am !, when there is no here and just me.
The day after Ms. Laura is admitted to the hospital, her daughter Amanda (Maria Hernández Giralt) shows up at the academy, no one has been broken at the waist like this actress, just as we see people beaten by drugs, bent like a Famóbil music video). Well, she’s not their daughter, but out of loneliness, they agreed to admit each other as mother and daughter. Now the work begins. The last remaining student, Elián (David Teixidó, tall and deep), also lives at the academy. He is someone who is waiting for an opportunity, who needs an opportunity and who knows that he does not even have the right to ask for it. And, with difficulty, Selva (Cristina Mariño, ironic, sagacious, authentic), the sister of Aguilés and Carlos, a nurse at the San Camilo hospital and recently separated, has just moved in among them. A handful of beings stripped and eliminated.
Rolls of toilet paper, open bottles of wine, file cabinets, stamps, the tire inflator, a dirty bathtub, overturned chairs, old school desks, dilapidated hoses, a water dispenser that still works…, smut, smut, smut. on stage, under a rusty light. These are things that we can unfortunately enumerate one by one, in the way, for example, in which they are described in Cosmosthe novel by Witold Gombrowicz (Seix Barral, 1969, trans. Sergio Pitol): “Pants. Shoes. Dust. We crawl. We hang out. Dirt, wheel marks on the road, a clod…” Director Sergio Boris cites Andrezj Zulawski’s film adaptation of this novel as an influence. But in every Argentine writer there is a heart fascinated by Gombrowicz, at least for generations.
Cosmos It’s about a group of people (barefoot, in pants and shirt sleeves), stuck in a squalid boarding house. As in Euphoria and dismay, In this book nothing happens other than the gestures of the protagonists (sitting on the bed, opening stained curtains…), just as in the play, it is the gesture which gives birth to speech. “I’m having trouble telling the rest of the story. I don’t even know if you can call it history. Is it possible to define this constant accumulation and dissociation… of elements… as Gombrowicz writes towards the end of the story? Cosmos.
Sergio Boris also explains that he was inspired by the Benjamenta Institute (“the boys of the Benjamenta Institute will never be anything”), the stuffy academy for lower classes that stars in Robert Walser’s novel, Jakob von Gunten (Siruela, 1998, trans. Juan José del Solar). The book and the play share characters sculpted with chisels and this precariousness of means, this subordinate condition of everything that happens, this lack of teaching staff at the academy, and also in both works arises the vital need to write a program, without knowing what. he will carry, to throw him against a mirage called finding a job. “We also do theater from time to time, comedies that degenerate into farces…” explains the narrator of the Benjamenta Institute.
All this, Euphoria and unease, Cosmos, Jakob von Gunten…that is culture, imposes itself as the most effective method, it appears as the only possible way to deal with the hipsterization, the gentrification of culture. The marginalized, the poor, those who refuse to integrate so as not to disintegrate have been excluded from cultural discourse. In the past, many of them ended up in the counterculture. Today, counterculture is the only culture. High culture is now counterculture.
The far right describes its crusade against this living culture, against culture itself, as a cultural war; but it is a war on culture. The far right has always been at war with culture. Remember, it was the far right that, in Granada, brought down García Lorca; the one who caused Miguel Hernández to die of tuberculosis in Alicante prison; the one who expelled into exile the best Spanish teachers, scientists, artists, musicians and intellectuals; the one who, in Argentina, kidnapped and disappeared forever Héctor Germán Oesterheld, the author of comic strips, the screenwriter of L’Éternaut, after also murdering his two eldest daughters; the one who, in Chile, tortured and killed Víctor Jara (he was shot forty-four times). Don’t believe it, there is no culture war. There is only war against culture.
That’s why it’s so important Euphoria and disappointment. Because it acts from the outside, like a living culture. He even acts outside of time, in the same way that his characters live outside of time. In this work, time moves away from life. It is an hour which does not leave the clocks, which floats in the atmosphere like the snow of The Eternaut. It’s time to forget the mysterious sentence of Hamlet (unusual time, there is no way to translate this), and which, centuries later, would give the original title to Philip K. Dick’s paranoid novel, Disjointed time (there is no way to translate this). It’s the time of the losers, who are our last refuge.
