The work of Matías Umpierrez is an investigation into the relation existing between the audience and the fiction of today’s presence. Through this inquiry, his projects set themselves at the frontier of the theatre, visual arts and curatorial projects generating dialectics between spectator-stage-scene-territory. His work, thus, creates dialog in a global manner; changing locations, languages, mediums and disciplines.
His works have been presented in unconventional spaces such as abandoned buildings, railway stations, food factories, churches, forests or theatres, cinemas and museums, including institutions such as Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires, Museo MALBA (Buenos Aires), Museo Pinacoteca de São Paolo (Brazil); Museo Reina Sofía and Spanish National Dramatic Centre-CDN (Madrid, Spain); the Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade in São Paulo (Brazil), Donostia Kultura (Basque Country, Spain); Territory Festival (Moscow, Russia), as part of New Directors/New Films presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art), and the Festival de Manizales (Colombia), among others.
Umpierrez’s projects include: Museum of Fiction I. EMPIRE (performative video installation proposing a possible ‘musealization’ of dramatic action in a museum collection space). Museum of Fiction I. EMPIRE has been presented as a film projection exclusively at FIT Festival (2021 Edition). The Forests (a video installation performance in which he creates dream universes with various people, a kind of unconscious fiction), Constructions (video installation in which he uses oral tradition, the main tool used to construct a myth, to create myths based on the lives of living people), TeatroSOLO-LONEtheater (global site-specific performance for one audience member at a time, which was staged in Buenos Aires, Graus, São Paulo, Madrid and San Sebastián, Portland), Distancia (virtual theatre performance with the actress streaming from four different cities: Buenos Aires, New York, Paris and Hamburg), dramaHOME (performance-intervention exploring the relationship between stay-at-home mums, computers and dramaturgy), Paisaje (video), Clínica de la Obsesión (Clinic of global artists presented in various cities around the world), 4 Mujeres Bailan (video), Gente Favorita (theatre), Cuionera Tropical (performance), La Flauta Mágica (The Magic Flute/opera) and Novela (theatre).
He was selected by Rolex for the Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative. The programme selects every two years a young artist from around the world in each discipline. Thanks to Mentor & Protégé Umpierrez started a collaboration and dialogue with his mentor the Canadian artist Robert Lepage. In 2016, he was the guest of honour, as an outstanding young artist, for the Proryv Prize in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2014, BGH named Umpierrez one of the 100 most innovative Argentines of the last 100 years. In 2009, he was awarded the Iberescena Scholarship for Young Creators and in 2010 he received an honourable mention for playwriting from the National Fund for the Arts (Fondo Nacional de las Artes) of Argentina.
Umpierrez also carries out curatorial projects that activate dialogues, creating local-regional-global networks and communities. As a result of his work for different institutions, he has created interdisciplinary curatorial projects that have brought together more than 120 original commissions.
< photos ® Matías Tavolaro
@ FIT
About The Musem of Fiction I. Imperio
2021 Edition
01.10 – 10.10
