Petróleo stages the daily lives of a group of men who work in an isolated oil field in the Argentinian Patagonia. Their everyday dynamic has been altered because one of them was recently hired to this extreme job. Living together in a trailer, only metres from the borehole, which is already almost empty (interesting tangential metaphor). And below the ground, the drill continues to violently penetrate the earth to draw out every last drop of the black gold. While, above ground, their free time is covered in dust. This is the fifth work by Argentine company Piel de Lava, a collective that has based its work (since they started around 2003) on the quest for a collective creation method, delving into the mechanisms for acting and group dramaturgy. Its members are four women, four actresses who run everything and who enjoy a close personal and work connection. For their fifth piece, they decided to put themselves in the skin of four men working in oil extraction, in cold Patagonia.

It all happened in 2018, the great year of Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa and Laura Paredes, the four members of Piel de Lava. They not only premiered Petróleo but also re-produced their four previous pieces to offer them all as a package, a sort of retrospective, at Buenos Aires’ Teatro Sarmiento. The idea of playing men was not for purposes of caricature or satire, but was a performance challenge they set themselves based on a pleasurable desire. Mariano Llinás said that together the four of them were an infinite fiction machine. They’ve done it all. All? Laura Paredes explains: ‘Playing men was also a bit of a joke. We asked ourselves: What haven’t we done? Well, within those infinite possibilities of fiction, let’s try being men. Then that led to a reflection on gender, which is a topic we were very interested in.’