Mapa Teatro
October 16-30, 2016

Swiss-born, Colombia-based artists Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden founded MAPA Teatro in 1984. Since its inception, MAPA Teatro has built a universe within the living arts, a place ripe for transgressing disciplinary boundaries, fusing languages and readings, and articulating local and global concerns. This residency is sponsored by the Getty Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA Initiative in partnership with LACMA.

Since its inception, Mapa Teatro has built a cartography within the milieu of the live arts, a propitious space for the transgression of boundaries–geographic, linguistic, artistic–for the confrontation of local and global issues and for the montage of mediums and dispositifs. It has begotten a space for migration, a continuous drift among myth, history and topicality; medias (theatre, opera, video, radio, installations, performance, urban actions); authors and the times (Aeschylus, Beckett, Müller, Shakespeare, Koltès, Sarah Kane, Bernhard, Antonio Rodriguez, Händl Klaus); geographies and languages (La Noche/Nuit in French and Spanish; West Dock in Russian; A Very Old Man with enormous wings in Tamil; De Mortibus in English, Spanish and French; I Long for the Alps; That’s how Lakes Come into Existence in French and Spanish); voice and image (4:48 Psychosis, It’s just complicated); Art, Memory and City (Prometheus, The Cleaning of Augias Stables, Witness to the Ruins, Shifting Cartographies); simulacre and reality (Exxxtrañas Amazonas, Trans/positions); poetics and politics (The Holy Innocents, Discourse of a decent man, The Unaccounted).

There lies Mapa Teatro’s interest in the translation of contemporary dramaturgies and the stage writings; in the transposition of classiques texts into current textures but also in the translation of social and politic issues into artistic dispositifs. In recent years, Mapa Teatro has particularly centered in the production of artistic events between micro-politics and poetics: through construction of ethno-fictions and the temporary creation of experimental communities, Mapa Teatro has spawned artistic experimentation processes at different locations a Colombian reality: a laboratory of the social imagination.

Past Residency: June 30 – July 30, 2015

This residency is supported by the Getty Foundation as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles taking place across Southern California from September 2017 through January 2018.

Artist Website