Acotaciones tras la cuarta pared
Marla Jacarilla (Alcoy, 1980) holds a BA in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and completed her education with an MA in Artistic Production and Research at the University of Barcelona. Beyond this conformity, her engagement with parallel literary work – which she combines with writing articles for magazines devoted to film criticism and analysis – has seen her adopt a hybrid territory of reflection, using resources related to artistic practice to explore the very process of writing. Its universal, omnipresent nature might induce us to think that exploring the narrative mechanic of the text would lead us, once more, to innocuous conclusions. However Jacarilla’s great ability is to quickly sweep such thoughts from our minds, awakening once more the demiurgic promise of the text. Scarcely hesitating, the artist restores its performative value to writing.
On this occasion, if we allow ourselves to be led by what Jacarilla proposes, we shall physically enter a space reserved for fiction, becoming witnesses to a dramatic unfolding in which a false demiurge converses with characters who are the protagonists of theatrical works that are familiar to many of us. We find ourselves, then, before an intentional exercise in decontextualisation and appropriation that, above all, brings us face-to-face with the complex uncertainty of “personification”. We need to understand here what this implies, even more so if we consider how we normally conceptualise the achievements of literature and how we reduce them to an endless list of characters. The vitality of this personification – its pulse – is, precisely, the product of the interminable hyperactivities that derive from the condition of the text. We all know that no one undertakes an act of reading or writing without the rhizomatic expansion of numerous associations immediately beginning to multiply. We all know that the richness of the text resides in that potential, that of divergent and distorted readings and writings that defy univocal interpretation. Let us admit it, then: narrative linearity is not completely congenital to us. It is the product of considerable discipline, which, in reality, is the result of an effort of concentration devoted to regulating and controlling those hypertextualities, which are continually generated. Hypertext is, therefore, the organic condition of the text. It is the living language. Careful, though: this is a vitality understood as that which is done at all times, performatively – a polysemous, simultaneous, magical thought.
Before such broad horizons, Acotaciones tras la cuarta pared (Theatre Direction Behind the Fourth Wall) suggests a possible exploratory line that implies entering into the entrails of an architecture which, in the theatrical context, is no more than imaginary, but, in the context of the Espai Cub, becomes objective. Here, there is no need to “break” that fourth wall, because it is provided with an access door, a strange instant of literality. In any case, the closing of the proscenium replaces the “specularities” typical of the theatre by a kind of self-absorption, an enclosure that may suggest to us the interior murmuring of the character. Faced by the explicit references to Krapp, Willy Loman, Lis and Berenguer, marked by a familiar subjectivity that is defined beforehand by their authors, we are forced to ask ourselves about that otherness, that fall imposed by the mise en abyme in which the characters find themselves as they return, disoriented, to the present, once more, to us… A strange opportunity for them to present themselves before the cruel judgement of time and history.
Links
- Article a MAKMA revista de artes visuales y cultura contemporánea
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