AMÉRICA continues the research of playwright and performer Francisco Mallmann. On stage, a naked body articulates the performativity of a speech, a public speech, a platform. The performer, however, keeps his back to the audience, a gesture that dramaturgically effects a refusal, an impossibility, a belated understanding of speech restitution. AMERICA verticalizes the decolonial textualities that Francisco Mallmann investigates in his writings, articulating southern epistemologies, transfeminisms and a marica - colonized, third-worldist gender identity, in which the homosexual experience is not dissociated from geopolitical markers. 

With a creative partnership between Semy Monastier (light) and Luciano Faccini (sound dramaturgy), AMÉRICA is a scenic experiment that escapes the very possibility of framing: it can be a play, a dramatic (re)reading, a performance, a installation, a public speech, a speech, an action. The work was developed in residency at Casa Selvática, a collective/company in which Francisco Mallmann and Semy Monastier are resident artists.

AMÉRICA is a work that articulates in its ethical-aesthetic making the intersectional decolonial displacements claimed by the epistemologies of the south. On stage, a naked, androgynous, mixed-race body performs a discursivity that mobilizes the notion of debt. “You owe me a story, America” is the synthesis of a gesture that demands the possibility of inscribing new imaginaries for marked, stigmatized and silenced bodies. AMÉRICA continues the dramaturgy/performance/poetry projects by Francisco Mallmann, such as Para Não Morrer (Scenic Space, 2017), Cabaret Macchina (Selvática Ações Artísticas, with Leonarda Glück and Ricardo Nolasco, 2018), Pinheiros e Precipícios (Selvática Ações Artísticas, 2016), I don’t give the other cheek (20minutos.mov/ Rumos Itaú Cultural, 2017) and There will be a party with what’s left (Urutau, 2018).  A hybrid work between theater/performance/public speech and dramaturgy. 

AMERICA makes discussions about Latin American bodies central, the result of historical, colonial, racist and homophobic violence. The theoretical-artistic scope of the work includes the contributions of Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzalduá, Jota Mombaça, Achille Mbembe, Paco Vidarte and Javier Saez. Our understanding of community as Latin Americans sounds urgent - a movement that allows us to move in relation to our geopolitical formation. Slavery, indigenous genocide and the military dictatorship are discursively intersected: founding and decisive violence in our sociability, subjectivities and imaginaries. AMERICA is an attempt to articulate in body-word the possibilities of stopping the bleeding.