Lola Arias (Argentina, 1976) is a multifaceted artist whose work brings together people from different backgrounds (war veterans, former communists, migrant children, etc.) in theatre, film, literature, music and visual art projects.
Arias’ productions play with the overlap between reality and fiction. “Sitting in the theatre, wandering a site-specific location or watching a film, we are inculcated into others’ narratives, wound into their complexities, joys and disappointments. At the same time, we are also invited and at times confronted, in an extraordinary and acute way, to reflect on the contingencies and fragilities of our own stories, individual and collective, as well as on our shifting, unresolved relation to the precarious and dangerous machinery that is social and political history.” (Etchells, in Re-enacting Life, 2019).
Since 2007 she has worked in the field of documentary theatre, creating over twelve plays in collaboration with people who have lived through different events or historical experiences. People who have, one way or another, survived.
My Life After (CTBA, Buenos Aires, 2009) is based on the biography of six performers who re-enact their parents’ lives during the dictatorship in Argentina. Familienbande (Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich, 2009) deals with role models in a contemporary family with three parents. That Enemy Within (HAU, Berlin, 2010) is a project about identity made in collaboration with two identical twins. The Year I was Born (Teatro a Mil, Santiago, 2012) is based on biographies of people born during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Melancholy and Demonstrations (Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, 2012) is a play about her mother’s depression. The Art of Making Money (Stadttheater Bremen, 2013) takes a concept from The Threepenny Opera by Brecht for a play performed by beggars, prostitutes and street musicians from the city of Bremen. And The Art of Arriving (Stadttheater Bremen, 2015) uses the example of Bulgarian kids living in Germany to develop a scenic tutorial that reflects on how to start a new life in another country.
Her most recent plays are Minefield (Royal Court Theatre, London, 2016), which brings together British and Argentinian veterans of the Falklands/Malvinas War to share their experience of the conflict and life since then, Atlas des Kommunismus (Maxim-Gorki Theatre, Berlin, 2016), which gathers stories of women between the ages of 8 and 84 with backgrounds in the GDR, What they want to hear (Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich, 2018), the reconstruction of the real case of a Syrian archaeologist trapped in German bureaucracy without any legal status for four years, and Futureland (Maxim-Gorki Theatre, Berlin, 2019), a science-fiction documentary piece with unaccompanied minors, teenagers who escaped from war, poverty and violence and travelled to Germany on their own.
Lola began her film career with the video installation Veterans (Battersea Art Centre, London, 2014), the starting point of her multi-disciplinary art project about the Falklands/Malvinas War. In this series, veterans reconstruct their experience of the war in a space they inhabit in the present day.
Her first feature film Theatre of War (2018) was selected for the 68th Forum of the Berlinale Film Festival and received several prizes including the CICAE Art Cinema Award, the International Confederation of Art House Cinemas Award and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Arias also won the Best Director Award at the 20th BAFICI Festival in Buenos Aires and the film received the Movistar+ Prize for Best Documentary Film at Documenta Madrid and the Silver Condor Award for Best Adapted Script.
Among other projects, in the visual arts and curating field, she developed My Documents (Buenos Aires, 2012-2017; Milan, 2018; Lisboa, 2020), a lecture-performance cycle where artists from different backgrounds present personal research, a radical experience, a story that secretly obsessed them. (Performances Doing It by Pedro Penim and Floral Arrangement by Filipe Pereira, were part of FIT 2021 Edition.)
@ FIT
Teatro de Guerra
2019 Edition
24.09 – 06.10
