ARCHIVES 2014 / La imaginación del futuro

On September 11, 1973, Salvador Allende made his last public speech as President of the Republic of Chile. A few minutes later, he killed himself in a Presidential palace under attack so as not to surrender to Augusto Pinochet's forces, who then established a dictatorship that would last seventeen years. That is the historical truth. But the company La Re-sentida doesn't stop there. What if Salvador Allende had had at his disposal a team of modern communication experts? Would have things been different, would he have had to act differently? If the Popular Unity coalition were to rise again tomorrow, would its foundation be more solid? By looking at the various potential paths history didn't follow, at what might have been, Marco Layera and his team try to let go of the idealised figure of Allende as a pacifist revolutionary. For once putting aside the admiration they have for him, the members of La Re-Sentida balance the action of the Popular Unity coalition against the effects of the terrible years that followed. Roughing up Chile's mythical leader a bit could allow those young artists born after 1975 to see through the current system more clearly and to let go of the nostalgia they inherited. In order to invent a system for today, which obviously cannot be the communist dream of the '70s, La-Resentida topple, with dark humour and cruelty, the all too often Manichean classification of the best and worst years in the history of Chile.

While studying law, philosophy, and criminology at the University of Chile, Marco Layera also studied acting at the drama school La Matriz in Valparaiso and at the school Imagen. In 2007, he founded the company La Re-sentida, which employs young Chilean actors who share his conception of art in general and drama in particular as tools of political thought, necessarily innovative and subversive, supposed to question what we understand as reality. With them, Marco Layera created Simulacro (The Simulacrum) and Tratando de hacer una obra que cambie el mundo (Trying to create a play that will change the world), the latter of which played in many international theatres and festivals, particularly in Europe. He has also created works that question current scenography techniques within the framework of two different projects, “Elencos ciudadanos” (“Citizens Elencos”) and “Laboratorios de montaje” (“Editing Labs”). He has written articles for the magazine Apuntes, published by the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and for Alias, a supplement to the newspaper Il Manifesto. He received the Eugenio Guzmán award from the University of Chile, and Tratando de hacer una obra que cambie el mundo won the award for best direction at the Festival de Teatro Joven at the Teatro Municipal de las Condes. After that cheerful play designed to bring people together, Marco Layera and his companions decided to change gears by adopting a brazen and provocative tone, to unsettle at the risk of offending, in order to find a new form of discourse that would be that of their generation.

Marion Canelas, April 2014