Macarena Remember Shepherd, the pseudonym of the artist Lidia Zoilo, returns to Madrid with her latest piece, after being in residence at Conde Duque and in the Sala Réplika. This new piece has already been a showcase success in Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao), La Mutant (Valencia) and Antic Teatre (Barcelona). COSA. Intervenir un cuerpo is the piece that closes her trilogy on illusionism, research that has led me to think about how illusion connects with the essence of theatre, exposing on the stage convention and magic, reality and its double, action and fiction. This research, which began in 2017, involves the pieces !AY! YAY! (2018), research on perceptual images thought from the body and The Watching Machine (2020), research on perceptual images thought from light, shadow and reflection. In Cosa.Intervenir un cuerpo, they investigate the perceptual images from the scenographic. To do this, they have thought of the body as another material, objectifying it to the point of turning it into a prop. COSA is a dance piece composed by an objective dance body.

The piece is an embodiment of what Deleuze said: “to create is to separate an image from all the clichés, going back against them.” The piece is made up of two parts. The two parts are the body and the set design. It is a choreographic laboratory which aims to research how different materials and objects can affect the interpreter’s body generating multiple readings. The first is a work of the body and the second of scenography, called object choreography, where a series of materials are displayed before the eyes of the public as bodies displaced through space. Movement, apparition, stage design, display, dance, in short, also intervened by a lighting work (designed by George Marinov), which alters perspectives by shifting shadows and creating new volumes. The references to Gordon Craig, and English actor and set designer, and Adolphe Appia, a Swiss theorist who worked with set designs. They use architecture and light to transform the space. Macarena Recuerda and her collaborators, Jorge Dutor and Maia Villot, also acknowledge how they are indebted to Bruno Munari, an Italian artist, designer, and writer well known for his work Sculture da viaggio, which inspires the possibility of the pop up as a dancing object. And with austerity and raw materials in mind, they are grateful to Xanti Schawinsky, Swiss painter, photographer, and theatre designer who was an alumnus of Bauhaus and then invited to Black Mountain College. The synthesis of everything is a dance where the protagonist is the cardboard material and the box object, shown in all their rawness and accompanied by the body object that gives them life.

Oriol Puig Taulé, the Catalan art critic, wrote: “The piece is calm and monochromatic with the colour of desert sand. But, like the Sahara, it hides several wonders. Architectural formations reminiscent of a ziggurat, mythological beings made of tubes, puppet-monsters or monster-puppets, depending on how you look at it". The piece could be ascribed to an eminently Mediterranean filiation of work without words and with objects that goes through Joan Brossa and Carles Santos and even through the humorous reinterpretation of Chema Madoz's photography. The piece also creates dialogues in contemporary artistic expression with artists such as Miet Warlop or Diana Gadish and Azkona & Toloza’s object work. In short, COSA.Intervenir un cuerpo, has sought, as Macarena says, a sense of estrangement from the traditional evocative image that alludes to something: "What if that referent to which the evoked thing alludes did not exist? What if it were a generative image on its own, with no clear anchors?” A suggestive invitation to look with new eyes and feel not from words or emotions, but from matter.