The fragility of movement, what one passes by, what one flees from, the fleeting conversations which take us, seeking something, from one place to another; accepting rootlessness and owning the desire to display a twisted wisdom, obliquely illuminated.
In our typical way of thinking with the gut, we recognise “what cannot be said and can only be shown” without the need to ask if it is true or really happened.
Those who talk of the utopia of escape know that there is nowhere to go. It has become global, and is no longer an exclusively European privilege; history is no longer written in Europe.
The house of Europe. So what house is it moving to? With what pockets? We are still trapped in chronological time, the time of history, constantly projecting us into the future, but loaded with all the weight of our past, fallen into ruin but very well conserved and archived.
Given the fragility of the ruins, we imagine a Europe washed, or washed away, by rain, and swept clean of Eurocentrism. A porous Europe, which can be observed, constructed, lived in from other perspectives, also with its own eyes, our eyes.
Perhaps the rainwater will make us more flexible. Perhaps it will let us recover the ingenuity we need to set another place at the table.
Ana Vallés
Matarile Teatro
Its artistic directors, Ana Vallés and Baltasar Patiño, founded the company in 1986 in Santiago de Compostela, where they also run exhibition spaces for contemporary creation. In 1993 they created Teatro Galán, a space for presenting and disseminating contemporary theatre and dance in Galicia, which they managed until 2008. From 1993 to 2005 Teatro Galán was used both for creation and for performance, and hosted over 1,300 shows. In its last three years of life it was used only for creation and for artists in residence.
From 1995 to 2007 they led the En pé de Pedra International Dance Festival in urban spaces. In 2017 they created a non-permanent independent exhibition space, Sala Montiel. They have staged over 30 shows, countless performances and pieces without specific formats, winning the company over twenty awards and mentions in different parts of Spain and Europe.
Shows by Matarile and Ana Vallés have been presented in Boston, Belgrade, Paris, Novi Sad, Oporto, Leipzig, Bologna, Dresden, Edinburgh, Almada, Bayonne, Bucharest, Rennes, Dinan, Douarnenez, Lanester, Brazilia, Tavira, Warsaw, Viana do Castelo, Cluj-Napoca, and Timisoara.
