Coronavirus has redesigned the way we work, meet and entertain ourselves and even though at the moment we are currently living in a post-Covid world, some institutions are continuing to look for innovative ways to connect artists and spectators through unconventional formats and languages.
Production platform Samara Editions, for example, offers spectators a new experience – performances by post.
One of the artists commissioned by Samara to create this experience is Tamara Cubas with her project "Monnula – Muñecas que migran" (Monnula – Dolls who migrate), co-produced with Spielart Festival in Munich (the project kicked off there in October), Vooruit Arts Centre in Ghent and Teatro Linea de Sombra in Mexico City.
Uruguayan choreographer and visual artist Tamara Cubas often creates participatory and immersive installations and for this project she collaborated with a group of craftswomen from the Comcáac community of Punta Chueca in Mexico.
Local artisan Maria Oralia Ortega and a team of women made 500 dolls following local traditions. Each doll was then packaged in a box with a travel diary that features the story of the doll and the ancestral traditions of her makers and that includes some blank pages.
By buying a ticket for this performance, a member of the audience orders one of these boxes that it is then delivered to their address. The performance activates when the member of the audience takes the doll, adds some notes to the travel diary and sends it to another person.
As each spectator chooses a new destination for the doll, new connections are activated and the historical and cultural origin of the doll is enriched with information about other countries and cultures.
In this way, a new shared cartography is traced through the journeys of the doll that becomes completely free: nobody owns it indeed but she can travel from one place to the next, creating a cross-border community of audiences, spread world-wide.
Rather than being just a simple toy made with leftover fabrics and destined to children, the doll becomes a powerful symbol, a metaphor to discuss key social issues, embodying women's experiences of migratory travels and developing a dialogue about cultures, religions, traditions and global issues.
