Teatro Ojo/Héctor Bourges/
Patricio Villarreal:
Disorganizing Mimesis

Teatro Ojo/Héctor Bourges/
Patricio Villarreal:
Disorganizing Mimesis

The Mexico City-based group Teatro Ojo essays the possible dispositions and sequences of gestures, images, and machinations that sketch tensions within the texture of a “spectral contract” on which the figure of the Mexican nation-state is incessantly organized and disorganized—a contract plagued by “public secrets”: what we all know, and yet we cannot utter. Bourges states the following about the lecture-performance Disorganizing Mimesis: “Five images of a radical theatricality: a flayed/flayer god; a talking cross that incites a silent indigenous uprising that lasted a hundred years; a skeleton of the last Aztec emperor made from the bones of birds, deer, dogs, and a woman’s skull; the corpse of Emperor Montezuma talks to his people through a sinister act of ventriloquism; Subcomandante Marcos is unmasked by the Mexican government in 1995…and he turns out to be the son of a furniture dealer.” 

Made up of Héctor Bourges, Karla Rodríguez, Patricio Villarreal, Laura Furlan, Gisela Cortés, and Emanuel Bourges, Teatro Ojo was founded in 2002 in Mexico City, where they still live and work. Their practice has shifted from conventionally theatrical territory to an expanded field that includes artworks, performances, and urban interventions that question memory, the city, violence, community, modernity, education, pre-language, and the post-human. Teatro Ojo’s most important projects include the installation Xipe Tótec, Ponte en Mi Pellejo (Put Yourself in My Shoes), at the 2012 Belluard Bollwerk International Festival, Fribourg, Switzerland, and Lo Que Viene (Forthcoming), a stage project at El Galeón Theater, INBA, Mexico City, also in 2012. In 2011, Teatro Ojo received the gold medal for best Theater Architecture and Performance Space in the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space.

Teatro Ojo/Héctor Bourges/Patricio Villareal: Disorganizing Mimesis is part of Living Together, curated by Rina Carvajal, MOAD’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, and independent curator Joseph R. Wolin. Living Together is made possible by the generous support of Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council..