“SPAM is an ambitious, pretentious and complex work, and that is precisely what makes it captivating and seductive. It invites the audience to think, to construct a story with the artists, to enter into delirious and fictional worlds in order to come to an abrupt end and think about their own identity”.

Tiempo Argentino

It is 2012 and time is running out for the Maya. But time does not really exist: it is merely a manifestation of hunger. A ridiculous apocalyptic fantasy with an end-of-the-party atmosphere, a spoken opera imbued with incredible musical soundscapes, peppered with badly learned pop music hits. Such is the spoken opera that Argentine artist Rafael Spregelburd will premiere in Spain in January 2017 as part of the XXXIV Festival de Otoño a Primavera. In SPAM, our thrown-away plastic swirls happily in the North Pacific on a floating island of nylon and bottles and virtual rubbish accumulates the same way in taunting, overflowing inboxes.

This is the story of a Neapolitan professor who loses his memory after a freak accident. He must reconstruct everything while battling the crude laws of chance; he must connect cause with effect. All we know is that our hero has refused to correct a student's thesis. Then, a spam e-mail (sent from an unlikely and translated Malaysia) pulls him into a formidable adventure worthy of James Bond: Google translators, pseudo-Chinese mafias on the island of Malta, dubious penis-enlarging techniques, badly understood snippets from an extinct dictionary from ancient Mesopotamia, fake under-the-sea Swiss documentaries, ghosts of Caravaggios and children and the warm air of apocalypse and ruins. Why think that a European banking crisis is the end of the known world?

SPAM first premiered on 10 October 2013 at the Teatro Colón (CETC) in Buenos Aires.

ARTISTIC AND TECHNICAL CREDITS

Practical info

• Teatros del Canal, Sala Verde
• 19, 20 and 21 January, at 8:30 p.m.
• Sunday, 22 January, at 6:30 p.m.

Vídeo

The critics say...

• “The piece will be an unforgettable lesson in intelligence, delirium and imagination”. La Nación
• “Rafael Spregelburd has created a parable about a hyper-connected world that is at once bright and dark. We recommend saving it safely in your inbox”. Revista Otra Parte
• “SPAM is an ambitious, pretentious and complex work, and that is precisely what makes it captivating and seductive”. Tiempo Argentino