One of the international artists invited to this year’s Boska Komedia / Divine Comedy is Malicho Vaca Valenzuela: a Chilean writer, director, and actor. His work addresses issues such as sexual diversity, gender, and human rights, while drawing on research into Latin American narratives and collective memory. Reminiscencja / Reminiscence is a solo performance even though Valenzuela is not alone on stage. The video footage invites to on-stage screen figures that connect him to his home city of Santiago de Chile: the object of love and fascination that he longs to share with the audience.

By telling the story of a place, Valenzuela tells the story of its people. He delves into the earth and, with a single click on a digital map, replays the love story of his grandparents, pulsing to the rhythm of boleros, fuelled with songs of love. He also takes a plunge into collective memory in search of the fragments of suppressed revolutions. Having found them, he turns them in his hands and examines them closely. Reminiscence is a biographical documentary essay that is at once tender, political, and intimate. Although it is his own story that the artist weaves, he also prompts the audience to ask questions: What will happen to our traces once we are gone? What will remain of us on the streets of our cities? What will survive us in the external memory of an old computer? What story will Google tell about us when we are no longer here?

The performance has been presented at over forty festivals worldwide – including in France, Canada, Chile, Spain, the US, the United Kingdom, and Colombia. Polish audiences will have the opportunity to see it for the first time at the Boska Komedia / Divine Comedy Festival.

---

Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d'Avignon