Tamara Cubas is a choreographer, visual artist, and culture producer in Uruguay. She is best recognized for solo and participatory performances and immersive installations. Cubas is codirector and cofounder of Perro Rabioso, a collective in Montevideo of artists who work in music, video, performance and hybrid forms. Her international recognition was made with Multitud, a large participatory work for a public space she has taken to three continents for the past ten years, in each city raising the veil on the limits of a multitude to self-organize for a common goal. All of Cubas’s work is process-centered and scalable, and dissects assumptions about the heterogenity of the masses and binaries between meetings and conflicts, public and private, and physical contact and the power that resides in everyone’s body.

The Project

For her 6-14 November 2020 LabX residency, Tamara Cubas traveled to Chicago with Alicia Laguna, collaborator and cofounder of Teatro Linea de Sombra, in Mexico City, to create a series of filmed embodied interview-movements with seventeen non-US born women residents of La Villita and Pilsen. For six days, using writing and movement prompts by Cubas, women reconnected their survival instincts of crossing (“travesía”) alone, from Mexico to the deadliest distance of the journey: the Sonoran Desert, the continent’s most remote arid zone which spreads over parts of southern California, western Arizona, and Sonora and Baja California in Mexico. 

What we did this week was we agreed, to experiment, to attempt ways to relate, to make a document about power, like we were saying before about the strength inside and the yearning for change, this is something which I think is a marvel and what this work is about… if only more people had half your power to go and follow what you most desire. The idea this week was to try things together… it was always ‘now we’re going to try this’ and it came from your consent…I am consummately grateful to you because of the time you dedicated to work together in this…unburying of your power. And that understanding of your position is a kind of muscle, it’s a musculature which you have. The crossing that we’ve been hearing as you all tell it, you are incredible. And we know…it is not over. In other words you are still training…like walking across the desert… because there are days, those were not easy and they are still complicated…There is a selfishness about this for me…I want…I yearn for some of what you have. —Tamara Cubas, November 12, from the closing day of the HCL workshop, transcribed and translated from the Spanish recording.

Since the HCL residency Cubas and Laguna are editing the audio and stills co-created with the women participants, to create the content for Sculpting Silence/Womyn body (Esculpir el Silencio/Mujer cuerpo), an immersive installation for a theater. It premieres in Santiago de Chile at Santiago a Mil-2021, the largest international theater festival in Latin America. Acclaimed Uruguay playwright Gabriel Calderón contributes dramaturgy, and an original audioscape is composed by Francisco Lapetina.

In Santiago, Cubas and Laguna are transforming a 19th century proscenium theater’s stage into an installation where the public are the only performers. The minimalist design is envisioned to be made entirely with salt brought in from the Atacama Desert, covering the floor and left in piles. Lapetina’s is using the audio from Chicago to design the low decibel soundscape, heard as a murmur of the wind from the Chilean desert on the seacoast. The shattering of salt underfoot of people walking in search of the sound’s source, while keeping their distance on the large playing space, releases the final acrid note into the air.We are interested in using salt as a symbolic, aesthetic, sculptural, processual, graphic, performative element, and the journey as a space-time research-experience field, to create a creative impulse. As in the history of women undertaking journeys driven by a desire and activated by determined vital bodies - without itinerary and without guarantees - in Silencio we propose to undertake a journey of salt from the Atacama desert to Santiago de Chile . Blocks and mountains of salt will be the bodies that cross a geography with the least possible degree of institutional intervention.—Tamara Cubas, October 2020, Montevideo, Uruguay.

About the Artist

Tamara Cubas (b. 1972, Montevideo, Uruguay) is a prolific choreographer, visual artist, and culture producer. She is best recognized for solo and participatory performances and immersive installations. Cubas is codirector and cofounder of Perro Rabioso, a collective in Montevideo of artists who work in music, video, performance and hybrid forms. Cubas’ original performance and installation works have been presented throughout Latin America as well as Europe. 

Heralding her international recognition is Multitud (2009-2019), a touring large-scale participatory performance most recently commissioned by Festival van de Gelikheid in Belgium, that examines the limits of a multitude to self-organize for a common goal. The outdoor performance for seventy members of the public questions heterogenity of the masses; meetings and conflicts between people, between the public and the private, the political and the poetical, carried on physical contact and the power that resides in everyone’s body. Leading up to the Festival in Belgium, individuals from the local area, of different ages and educational backgrounds, worked with Cubas on the voice, sound, energy and language of the body, collectively creating a choral choreography and unleashing a group action for a public space. 

Cubas’ flagship project is The Anthropomorphic Trilogy, a work for the theater rooted in Antropofagia Cultural, the cultural aesthetic movement that grew into national political actions and initiated in São Paulo, Brazil, sparked by Oswald de Andrade’s 1922 manifesto. de Andrade urged a reformulation of the Brazilian identity, proposing a revaluation of aesthetic principles, linguistic manifestations, and indigenous cultural expressions. Cubas based The Anthropophagic Trilogy explicitly on the movement’s three principles for denouncing the social reality and constructing the new identities: Remain (Permanecer), Resist (Resistir), and Subdue (Avasallar).

Notes from the artist
Themes of Esculpir Silencio (Sculpting Silence), creation 2021

Womyn Body (Mujer cuerpo)

There are travels and there are crossings; the first implies a cartography chosen with freedom and traveled with desire (even while travel is from a duty), the second, however - the crossing - implies a geographical and geopolitical crossing whose conditions vary according to human circumstances, among thousands of variables.

What happens to the individual, and more precisely, the woman, throughout a journey driven by a strong need to leave a conflictive origin to arrive at a desired, longed for, fantasized, imagined destination, as a place of salvation? The journey follows a relatively predefined itinerary. The voyage knows the name of its desired destination, but has no idea of its mapping.

The conditions of these voyages are often dire, and the stories of their failures dire and well known. What motivates a single woman, often with her back laden with small babies, to submit to the announced shipwreck? What makes you believe that she will not be shipwrecked, that her story will be different? What are you willing to lose, to change, to negotiate, to die, to make sure you complete this journey? 

If the woman on this journey were to ask all those questions and contemplate their answers, she might not move. But there is a desire that pulses, empowers, drives the body crazy and pushes it to act and not reason. Reasoning is the enemy of the journey. The silent body is the absolute protagonist, until it is in a state of absolute exhaustion. If it reaches the threshold of death, reason is activated, in its most vital, most essential, purest and necessary state.

On the verge of insanity, reason has never been so lucid.

The power of a woman determined by her body to leave an origin to build a new destiny.

Salt

One of the most abundant mineral substances in nature, salt has been exploited, industrialized and used as a tax element since pre-Roman times - hence the term “salary”, its use as barter and currency. In addition to its nutritional and medicinal properties and its use in food preservation, since ancient times and throughout the planet - Asia, Africa, Europe - salt has acquired religious, esoteric and alchemical meanings that have associated it with such powers. evil as miraculous. The salt-covered desert is the place chosen to punish bad souls, as well as being a symbol of purification in sacred religious and pagan rites. The sea is full of salt and salt shakers that are found under, above and within the earth all over the planet.