Devórate

Co-production: Iberescena 2019 · Brazil – Spain

“Mari Paula uses her body as a canvas for experimentation, embodying the digestion of the plastic monster and its expulsion from paradise.”
— Pilar Jódar Peinado · Spanish Academy of Performing Arts

Synopsis

This performance was created to degrade in 450 years on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where plastic swallowed the future. Scrap of humanity, an anthropophagic woman was turned into a digital proletarian after the crisis of representation. She eats herself in search of the pleasure of the collective body she once lost.

Ten metres of plastic, a machine and a body. Light, shadow and ancestry. A struggle between the organic and the synthetic, which suffocate each other until they become a synthesis of perfection, sculpted by the greatest of sculptors.

Devórate is the post-apocalypse and a new history of humanity, this time told and illustrated by a woman’s body. The end of the world is here.

Digesting the dystopian future

Devórate is the second work in Mari Paula’s Anthropophagic Trilogy. Through the female body, it explores the unbridled consumption of plastic, technological development and their impact on human existence.

From ecocriticism and gender theory, the piece questions the destruction of the environment in the name of progress, as well as hegemonic discourses and the role of women in the art world.

The stage sets up a relationship between the female body, plastic and machine. Plastic appears as an invasive material and the waste of a humanity that has turned consumption into a way of survival, while technology takes part in a transformation of the body increasingly distant from the organic.

Carlos Molina’s lighting builds atmospheres and visual landscapes that accompany and amplify the experience of the body. With a deeply analogue approach, the piece puts matter, technology and organism in tension.

Devórate thus imagines an ecology of collapse: a body that absorbs, digests, transforms and gives back what passes through it. An anthropophagic body that feeds on the remains of a world in the process of disappearing.

Artistic team

Direction, concept and performance: Mari Paula
Movement direction: Rebeca García
Dramaturgical and movement collaboration: Janet Novás · Leonarda Glück · Reinaldo Ribeiro · Ricardo Nolasco
Outside eye: Lívia Delgado
Lighting design: Carlos Molina · Spacecircles
Touring technician: Semy Monastier or Carlos Molina
Sound design: Jaime Peña
Graphic design: Torreón Arquitectura
Photography and video: Anjana Guerras
Executive production: Gabriel Machado · Mari Paula
Artistic production: Giovana Lago · Águila Produções

Residencies: Casa Hoffmann · Centro Coreográfico Canal · Nigredo Espacio · EiMa Creació · Carme Teatre · La Espiral Contemporánea · Palacio de Festivales de Cantabria · Graner

Supported by: EBANX · Fundação Cultural de Curitiba · Iberescena 2019 · FUNARTE

Co-production: Iberescena 2019 · Brazil – Spain
Premiere: September 2019 · Palacio de Festivales de Cantabria · Santander