After the publication, in 2019, of a news item about the existence of indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon, living in isolation by self-determination, and attracted by this act of resistance that dates back three hundred years, Mapa Teatro tracks and fictionalizes evidences noted by this news. The narrations of shamans, anthropologists, and eyewitness accounts, offer us only some indirect evidence.
This search for the existence of indigenous communities in isolation by self-determination, is carried out by Mapa Teatro in the same way that quantum physicists trace the tiny particles that make up the universe, or that astronomers try to determine the existence of planets in other galaxies: confronted by the impossibility of perceiving them directly, they direct their gaze to the forces and vibrations that they imprint on the space that surrounds them.
A year later, in 2020, Mapa Teatro is forced to stop its research for a year, when we are all put in isolation under a strict confinement, due to the pandemic. During that year, each of us experiences strange vibrations in our bodies that coincide with the evidences found in the creation process: the appearance of a third leg, the touch of a beast, the sound of an arrow, the presence of a border, the threat of a proximity.
Despite these coincidences, the survival strategies imposed by the pandemic are not even remotely close to the forms of resistance that isolated communities by self-determination have adopted towards the politics of death and racialization in the trans-Amazonian territory. Is it possible then, that under these circumstances, our search as artists is to allow the isolated people to take over our sleep/dreams so that we experience the possibility of a new way of existence and another way of resisting?
September, 2021
