Yo deseo
(recital electrónico de inconfesiones femeninas)

One of the maxims of feminism states: “If there is no pleasure, it is not our revolution.” This pleasure must come, moreover, from a position of subject of desire, not from the traditionally patriarchal and heteronormative position of the desired object. It is time to reverse the obsession with men and how men feel and turn that focus to women. It is time to break down the oppressive patriarchal structures that favour men. Virgina Woolf did not demand a room of her own to live a culturally autonomous life to the fullest. She demanded it to experience her sexual freedom free from the labels society attaches. In our uninhibited and even debauched artistic world, all this may sound like old-fashioned music, but it still works as a disguised repressive machine for many women. Listening to how so many others have wished throughout history is a way to find a mirror from which to banish shame and guilt. Listening to it in Eva Rufo's voice, accompanied by Enrico Barbaro, is pleasure upon pleasure.

The title of this recital says it all: I desire. (This is the English translation of the name given to the performance.) A recital of the unmentionable. Words conjugated with electronic music that promises to raise the room’s temperature. Poetic texts from the margins of the official masculinised world, travelling from Sappho to Sor Juana Inés, through Li Ye, Wallada, Hildegard of Bingen, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Hafsa Al-Rakunía, Beatriz de Día, Christine de Pizan, Florencia Pinar, Teresa de Ávila, Louise Labé, Gaspara Stampa or Aphra Behn. Their voices will intertwine with more contemporary voices such as Anne Frank, Gloria Fuertes, Alejandra Pizarnik, Idea Vilariño, Gioconda Belli, Ana Rossetti, Aurora Luque, Anne Carson, and Elena Medel. At its soul, the discovery of one's own body, the contemplation of the loved one’s beauty, the excitement, the sexual encounter, the separation, and the absence, all from the active and desiring position, in the first person.

It is not Eva Rufo’s first time performing a recital. She is a well-experienced artist in this performance area, and she was the driving force behind this piece. She has already done so from great texts of our literature in Prisiones del alma (which was performed on-line as part of 2020’s unique Festival de Otoño). Her performance genius can also be seen in mystical poetry in Esta divina prisión and from the scarce but imposing legacy of the Greek poet Sappho in Participar de las rosas de Pieria. Here she gives a twist to the concept and acts as a medium to bring us all those desiring female voices with live music by Enrico Barbaro, Italian composer and multi-instrumentalist, recordings, and projects with artists such as Ornella Vanoni, Enzo Gragnaniello, Donatella Rettore and Pietra Montecorvino. In Spain, he has collaborated with Camilo Sesto, Carmen Linares, Jorge Pardo and, above all, with Asier Etxeandía, with whom he created the Mastodonte project in 2018. Enrico reinterprets live, through a sieve of electronics, pieces from the classical repertoire of Hildegard Von Bingen, Pergolesi, Jordi Savall, Domenico Scarlatti, and Korsakov. Together with Rufo, he builds a novel scenic artefact that aims to seduce the audience through an immersive experience in female pleasure.

The Festival de Otoño once again demonstrates its commitment to the poetic arts. With Sergio Adillo, an expert in writing from classic themes and texts, as the playwright and directed by Eduardo Mayo, Yo deseo arrives in Madrid after its premiere this summer at the Almagro Festival. It makes us listen to a traditionally secret, hidden, repressed word. As the French essayist Mona Chollet states: "Let us hope that there will be more and more of them and that they will speak louder and louder. And that their voices will finally take their rightful place in the definition of what we call love".