The theater of death is the designation given to a group of works by the Polish playwright Tadeusz Kantor. Autobiographical in nature, this set of pieces was characterized by the fact that reality on stage (the physical presence of Kantor, his story in memories and images), had to have its counterpart in illusion. The key was that this reality-illusion tension had to remain balanced without either taking full control. The figure of Kantor on stage was another factor, in a double role, he directed and was material for the play, representing characters who led and gave instructions to the actors. A link between his life, fiction and the fabric that emerges from this relationship.

Lihuel González proposes his own theater idea, present in the scene in fragments that bring his body, a self-portrait and a set of elements that make up a map of his history, he addresses a series of questions: his look from the outside, his body dislocated in parts and a set of fictional elements. A stuffed dead bird sits on a hand made of wax. The image of a ghost hangs from the ceiling. Portraits of women looking at each other. List of words that take shape and bring images that are not there. The fall. Over time. Old age.

For years it records the diffuse, portraits that are lost in black backgrounds, imperceptible gestures that arise from exercises of meticulous observation, journeys of meaning between languages, and slow movements like the mark of a patient eye that looks, hoping to find senses that do not finish coming out. the visible.

The certainty that something is there but we cannot see it.

The presence of something that had a body.

An out of field.

What allows to see through.

Bodies that drive space.

What goes from one place to another.

The space that changes shape.

The time of a body.

Death in all its forms.

Resurrect.

Return.

A landscape does not cease to exist even if we turn our back on it is an essay that could be framed in the logic of the theater of death: a dialectic between the presence and absence of Lihuel as a material part of the work and as an author at the same time.

Organized into two acts that evoke the logic of a theatrical piece, the show displays a series of elements that portray the invisible: they replace with ideas, shapes or memories, the spaces left by things that are not there. The interstices. The space between glances. What a fabric hides. What a mask covers. What completes a fragment. What is glimpsed.

The temporal dimension that acts bring operates as a form of continuity between something that is, then leaves, and is modified to return with another form. The presence of an act that is completed in the second by inscribing a circular narrative: exercises that portray the invisible, death as the absence of a living body and resurrection as the possibility of a new beginning.

How to portray what cannot be seen? Is there a first image that works as a reference for the idea or is it possible to think of something that we never saw?

Maria Alejandra Gatti