Los huesos

Manuela Infante directs, from 15 to 18 October at the Teatro María Guerrero, a piece that combines research, music and stage language to explore the memory of victims of enforced disappearance and the relationship between the living and the dead.

Performed as a monologue by Marcela Salinas, the piece grows out of the experience of the South American forensic anthropologist R. L., a specialist in bone trauma and in the identification of missing persons in various parts of the world. After decades of interpreting human remains with scientific rigour and producing hundreds of expert reports, the researcher poses a new question: what might be revealed if that same data were read through music? This opens the possibility that what bones preserve might also be heard.

Starting from this premise, the show proposes an artistic evening that does not seek to reconstruct biographies or represent those who are no longer here, but to create a space where memory can manifest itself in other ways. Music thus becomes a territory of listening and encounter, a place where the echoes of the past converse with the present and where absences acquire a new dimension.

Inspired by the reflections of the philosopher Vinciane Despret on the relationship between the living and the dead, the performance is inhabited by incomplete presences, fragmented identities and nameless bodies that emerge from enforced disappearance. In that scenic universe, the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, between scientific evidence and sensitive experience, blur in order to invite the spectator to deliberate on the human consequences of political violence.

Artistic credits:

Venue: Teatro María Guerrero - Sala Grande

Text - Michael de Cock, Manuela Infante and Marcela Salinas

Direction - Manuela Infante

Cast - Marcela Salinas

Live music - Kristian Orellana

Set design and lighting - Rocío Hernández

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