BIOGRAFÍA COLECTIVA

 

Malinche Malinches 2020 - 21


"To those who do not know, I've lost my memory"

Aeschylus

“La Trilogía Mexicana,” a stage production by La Máquina de Teatro created over four years between 2007 and 2010, was a space for the exchange of historical realities and cultural fictions between the “previous” and the “present” world. It was history brought back to life and reinvented, but not out of a solemn, paralyzing mourning, or a mythologizing dream that conceives of an almost idyllic past. Instead, it sought to explore the complex weave of emotional and sensorial textures that emerge in the daily lives of Mexican men and women when we stand before the stone or the pyramid, the flag or a Nahuatl word, or simply before this great city we call Mexico, which as we know rises over another great metropolis, Tenochtitlan, which supports our steps.

Each part of the trilogy addressed Nezahualcóyotl, Moctezuma and La Malinche in turn, all three of them historical figures, as well as ghosts, presences, symbol and reality, not with a cold desire for historical revisionism but as a liberating form of recognition in the here and now.

The project also involved turning to and reconsidering our Mesoamerican heroes and trying to unbalance a history at once clear and murky, one that has been told a thousand times, to put us into motion, activate our bodies, our voice and our senses, to weave History with our story. Today, with the project Malinche Malinches 2020/21 we propose to take up all of the above from the here and now, ten years later, on the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan. We seek to recycle the past and mix it up with new lives, new generations and new forms of expression.

The project began in October last year in response to the urgent need to address the issue of violence against women, new feminisms and, of course, the pandemic. We speak from the lockdown.

La Malinche is a character, a woman, a “something” in our collective unconscious that we fail to wholly understand, or we find hard to grasp or interpret. Thinking about her, about “La Malinche,” a question irrevocably emerges: who are we? Every attempt to explain Mexico is closely bound up with her, with history, myth, legend, supposition, gossip, intuition, fantasy. La Malinche is many women, is many things. She is our country and is the other: duality and inheritance.

This project aims to collectively rethink and reimagine the image of La Malinche as a historical character interwoven with the daily lives of many modern Mexican women from the most diverse cultures and social groups. It is an approach that seeks to develop a critical perspective on the situation of the feminine body/territory that is historically characterized, to a great extent, by violence, conquest and pillaging. Through the figure of La Malinche and Las Malinches, embodied in hundreds of testimonies, we can rethink the dominant historical discourses that have long placed women in the margins of history.