Tania Candiani

Cuatro actos (Four Acts) is a project where the artist approaches the theatrical language, its mechanisms, and its communication codes as a strategy to reveal and hide a specific construction of reality. The whole approach is based on the interest in the tools that build a staging.  The curtain was chosen as the element that opens the representation, and that hides the artifices that make up the work: pulleys, ropes, counterweights, a whole system to open and close the mouth of the stage.

The project focuses on the idea of reveal and hide, embodied in the same curtain, and employs a series of actions to highlight some processes of historical and political concealment that have been recurrent in Latin America.
 The exercise of opening the curtain is a way of unveiling but also of resisting, of “getting up” as a way of confronting the official version and insisting on other truths, other narrations, and other discourses.
This project was presented as a piece in process composed of three parts: the work of making the curtains open to the public; a scenario in which four collaborative actions occurred within the curtains; and the documentation of each of those actions. The four acts were developed in collaboration with national artists.

These actions are directly linked to the relation between sound and language disruption, machines and artifacts for communication, reading and writing, spoken and written text, education, roles of gender, translation and interpretation mechanisms, and the remixing of different data and processes — all these in dialogue with the interests and practices of each of the invited artists.