Des/montaje: Variation #2 on discourse of a decent man
Based on an image found in a video archive, Mapa Teatro decided to create an “etno-fictional essay” using different formats. A presidential inaugural speech found in Pablo Escobar’s shirt pocket, on the day of his death. Eighteen years later, this fictional presidential speech (actually written by an expert in political rhetoric), “classified” as a secret document by the CIA in 1993, is turned into a “declassified archive” by Mapa Teatro.
Initially staged as a lecture performance at the Kaai Theater in Brussels (2011); as a theatre piece at the Pablo Tobón Uribe Theatre in Medellín (2012) and as an installation for video and sound at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna (2013), Discourse of a decent man is the result of multiple poetic strategies -visual, sound, film, performance, theatre- and montage operations. In two adjacent rooms of the Museo de Antioquia, Mapa Teatro exhibits fragments of this “presidential speech’s” as “evidence”, and it is the audience, the final operator, who ultimately assembles and dis/assembles these fragments, creating their own fiction: the archive is the fiction/the fiction is the archive.
Medellín, Colombia
