Rompimiento embocadura is a performative installation about theatrical imagery. In particular, on material images created to sustain the scenic event: the curtains. The work, which will unfold throughout the exhibition, is inscribed in the subaltern current of "barred theatre or theatre without theatre "1, which encourages the emancipation of the theatrical machine from hegemonic theatre. The theatrical machine would be any theatrical device whose ultimate aim is not to make theatre, but which, when activated, provides the conditions of possibility for the emergence of other theatricalities. Rompimiento embocadura is thus a tribute to theatre without theatre, or rather, to theatre without theatre with theatre.

In Rompimiento embocadura, hundreds of curtains by Germans Salvador, a well-known family of 20th century stage designers, rest on a support. Old folded images of various kinds within reach that not only the imagination can awaken. Images made for the time of the performance, some of them will recover another unexpected life. Marta and Núria Castells and Helena Salvador, continuers of the work of Castells i Planas and Germans Salvador, two of the great families of theatrical image-makers in Catalonia, will carry out the restoration in situ of several curtains during successive public sessions, practising a craft of which they are the last bearers. Once repaired, the curtains will be raised and supported by a structure, forming a scene of images in continuous transformation throughout the duration of the exhibition.

The restored backdrops are ruptures, images whose hollowness gives a glimpse of where the gaze wants to escape to. Embocadura is the opening that separates or joins the stage from the audience, that is, the place of doing from the place of contemplating. Rompimiento embocadura provides an undifferentiated space or open and passable scene between images of wallpaper without background, thus leaving the theatre out in the open, generating a kind of theatre of incandescent emptiness. A theatre of emptiness that does not seek to create new images for the current scopic regime, but rather to experiment with the possibility of a stage hauntology that, through remains or embers, revives other theatricalities to be recovered.

2023

Collaboration, dramaturgy and design: Víctor Ruiz Colomer
Restoration: Marta and Núria Castells, Castells i Planas family and Helena Salvador of the Germans Salvador family
Curtains: Germans Salvador
Loan of curtains: Showtex
Blacksmith: Gustavo Bernabé
Acknowledgements: Castells i Planas and Germans Salvador families, Élise Moreau and Marc Vives

Fernando Gandasegui (Segovia, 1988). Artist, curator and researcher in performative arts. He is currently the curator of the festivals Domingo at La Casa Encendida and Secuencia at Fabra i Coats, and co-directs the web platform Teatron. His artistic work has been presented in various national and international institutions and forms part of the CA2M Collection and the Archive of Creators at Matadero. He was part of the PLAYdramaturgia collective, and has been artist-in-residence at Graner, La Caldera and Malavoadora, among others. He was coordinator of Teatro Pradillo in Madrid and was part of its artistic direction. He has curated cycles for the Punto de Vista Festival, co-directed La Plaza en Verano at Matadero and co-designed residency and research programmes at the Centro Cultural de España in La Paz. He has directed the communication of several festivals, published in various media, catalogues and programmes, and continues to write in his blog.

RELATED ACTIVITIES 

27.06, 05.07, 13.07, 07.09 / 16:00 h: Rompimiento embocadura (Curtain Restoration) / Fernando Gandasegui with Marta and Núria Castells and Helena Salvador

15.07 / 11:00 h: Rompimiento embocadura (Theatrical Haptics) / Fernando Gandasegui with Magdalena Garzón