"Trewa. Estado–nación o el espectro de la traición". The Power of the Gaze

Abstract

Trewa. Estado - Nación o el espectro de la traición (Trewa. Nation State or the Specter of Treason) was premiered in 2019 ending a two-year process of artistic and interdisciplinary research; the documentary, ethnographic theatre project was led by Paula González Seguel and co-produced by the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (CIIR). Further developing the aesthetic and political endeavor that theatre company KIMVNTeatro embarked on in 2009, Trewa focuses on the exhumation of environmentalist Macarena Valdés to unveil the violence that the alliance between State and neoliberal capitalism has exerted upon the mapuche people and their ancestral territory. Beyond the dramatic conflict, I suggest that the fundamental strength of Trewa resides on the staging where the mapuche epistemology and cosmogony breaks in to destabilize the conventions of Chilean canonic theatre practice. If we agree in considering the theatrical event as part of the social discourse which sets the boundaries of what is to be imagined or said in certain historical moment and place, I propose that Trewa explores on stage the expansion of those boundaries while the Constitutional Convention is currently debating to declare Chile a plurinational State.