La Comedia Humana is a transdisciplinary team of artists and professionals that take theatre and theatricality as a departure point to reflect on present issues. Their latest project, La Comuna: Revolución o Futuro, focuses on community-based practices. In each community, they organise workshops, artistic interventions, and open events according to a double axis: memory and the future. They intend to detect which visions of the future exist among diverse population samples while collectively elaborating an imaginary genealogy of each community’s past and memory. Finally, asking people about their revolutionary aspirations helps them understand if and how these could lead towards the making of their ideal community.
La Comuna, chapter 1: Performative Implications.
Between November 2013 and May 2014, La Comedia Humana worked with residents from Campamento 2 de Octubre, a well-known neighbourhood in Mexico City due to its housing and land struggles in the 60s. The Memory and Territory workshop took place with founding members of the community – mostly women – while the Performative Journalism workshop gathered teenagers from the area. I participated as a researcher, performer, and Performative Journalism instructor.
Memory & Territory: the workshop investigated local inhabitants micro stories and gathered anecdotes about the construction and development of Campamento 2 de Octubre.
Performative Journalism: the workshop aspired to create a space in which the youth of Campamento 2 de Octubre could express their everyday concerns and their visions of the world, be it through spatial, visual or written channels.
Past | Present | Future. From March to May, we jointly organised three events in which participants shared texts and images to rescue the memory of Campamento 2 de Octubre, and during which it became possible to problematize together the present of the community and its future possibilities.
Daniela Pascual 