‘My name is Marina Otero and I’m the director of this project, but I’m essentially a dancer. Before starting, I’d like to tell you I recently came out of the operating theatre and I’m still not sure how I’m feeling here today.’ That’s how Fuck Me starts. We’re going to get to know this tightrope walker in Madrid and in Spain who lives and works on the same tightrope and you never know when she’s fallen on the side of reality and when on the side of fiction. Born in Buenos Aires in 1984, her work is framed within a grand project she baptised as Remembering in order to Live, with which she wants to craft an unfinishable work about her own life.

What started off as a solo ended up entrusted to a group of six men. Marina worked from a distance, prostrate in bed, writing however she could, sending videos of the choreographies she made with her cousins and schoolmates from the 90s (‘I’m obsessed with childhood, the 90s, that aesthetic, I wanted the boys to learn these dances, when choreography at this level is so “vintage” in contemporary dance’). The men represent many things with regard to how they are presented in Fuck Me and how they turn up in my own life. I’ve got a personal problem related to dependence on men, something I’ve still not been able to transform. And I said: I’ve got to include men in my show to try to understand it and, in parallel, the work plays with the idea of me being able to manipulate them, because if not, I feel imprisoned in this impossible love that the male gender is for me. Through the work, I want to understand them and I want to manipulate them and I want to control them. I am a bad and bitter director and dancer, because I objectify them when I direct them, almost like a type of revenge. That’s related to this society where women are aesthetically condemned to having to always look pretty, to having a nice arse and all that, and men can be bald, fat and old and everything will still go well for them. Love Me came after Fuck Me, her last work to date, which we’re also going to see at the festival this year. After sex, love. Sex is body. Love is not so much the body as time. Or maybe love is a body sustained over time.