LONDON.- Explore the best and latest of Latinx art, performance, culture, music and film when
CASA Festival returns to venues across London for its 11th edition. Founded as a theatre festival in 2007, CASA expanded its remit to include multiple art forms, as well as becoming a commissioning body and a production house. Today, CASA is an internationally regarded showcase for some of the beautiful, challenging and unique work being made both in Latin America and by the UK’s Latinx artists community. To date the festival has created and commissioned over 100 pieces of new work.
At a time when travelling internationally is challenging, CASA facilitates artistic and cultural exchanges between Latin America and the UK, bringing to London all the innovation, passion, artistry and diversity that these artists have to offer.
“After a Covid-required hiatus in 2020, I’m thrilled that CASA Festival is returning for the whole month of September 2021,” says artistic director Cordelia Grierson. “Despite Covid, our activity is all about connecting: connecting UK artists with global artists to create and enhance their practice, and connecting audiences with each other. With CASA 2021 we will reopen creative borders and encourage genuine inter-cultural exchange.”
EXHIBITION – PERFORMANCE – INSTALLATION
Curated by Cecilia Kuska and Cordelia Grierson, CASA 2021’s exhibition, performance and installation programme takes place in two locations: Monochrome Studios in Whitechapel, east London (Sept 2-11) and Brixton Village in south London (Sept 16-18).
“The exhibition at Monochrome Studios seeks to question the meaning of nationality and displacement, wondering what it means for a body to belong to a land that has been dominated and violated by western power.”
Exhibition highlights include Synchronized Serpent, where silhouettes and backgrounds dance in harmony in this collaboration between Argentinian artist Cecilia Bengolea and the Jamaican national swimming team, whose current coach is Olympic gold medallist Olga Novokshchenova. Video installation La Copla in the Amphitheatre of Quebrada de las Conchas by Argentinian collective G.R.A.pa shows the Calchaqui Valleys’ landscapes, where Diaguitas’ songs have been reverberating for hundreds of years. Entrar Tarde by Argentinian artist Damiana Poggi is a video performance about the pat-downs carried out in jail by police officers to inmates and visitors, based on her experiences visiting her father in prison. Born in an Indigenous Reserve in Brazil, artist Zahy Guajajara expresses herself through her art to defend indigenous people and their causes. Now based in the UK, her new project Aiku’è Zepé explores body and nature as inseparable beings going through an identity-seeking process. 432 by Chilean artists Amelia Ibañez and Marcos Sánchez is an intuitive study of a place, where the landscape and its elements influence the performers and the camera. Un campo en el entre by Mexican artist Shantí Vera explores how our body can make us unearth other ways of seeing, thinking and discovering the world.
Live performances at Monochrome Studios include Where to Belong (Sept 3). Presented by Jewish-Lebanese Latinx queer theatre maker Victor Esses and CASA, in partnership with Counterpoint Arts, it’s the tender, moving autobiographical story of Victor’s journeys – an exploration of how to find your place in a complex world of identities. London-based Peruvian actor and theatre maker Pepa Duarte brings her latest show Señorita Rita to CASA (Sept 10) – through comedy, music, dance, macrame, tinder memoirs, and pachamama-yoga, this Latina drag performance challenges what being a Latina migrant is all about.
Following the cancellation of the 2020 festival, CASA was awarded emergency funding from the Arts Council to commission four new works. Created especially for CASA, these works will premiere on Sept 4. Co-presented with the Chilean Department of Culture, moving image installation They Gave Me A Map (and I drew them a line) by UK-based Chilean/Indian artist Shalini Adnani combines satellite images from Google Earth with images of mourning women to explore land, loss and displacement. With verbatim dialogue Work, Workers, Working by UK-based Brazilian Joana Nastari sees actors portray how workers across the adult industry have adapted under lockdown. In high art film mocumentary Isla/Island, UK-based Venezuelan Andrea Spisto explores topics including loneliness and her ever-evolving relationship with having ‘Latinex roots’. Unlike the mermaids who roam the seas in classical mythology, in Las Sirenas by Argentinian writer and theatre director Laura Sbdar and actor, filmmaker, dancer and musician Nicolas Goldschmidt, these suicidal characters breathe and drown in an open-air rubbish dump.
Championing all things new, CASA New Ideas (Sept 11) is an artistic open mic: a space for artists who want to try out new work and receive live feedback from the audience – particularly pertinent considering it’s been a hard year in isolation for all of us. Featuring a selection of UK-based Latinx artists: Joana Nastari (Brazil), Andrea Ling (Bolivia), Lucila Greco (Argentina), Carlos Fernandez (Paraguay).
CASA 2021’s installation programme will also take over a shop window in Brixton Village (Sept 16 – 18). Come and experience the freedom of bodily expression by some of the most interesting contemporary Latinx artists. Available to watch for FREE, this public art installation includes Les Revenants by Argentinian directors Luciana Acuña and Alejo Moguillansky, a play-installation using Chilean performers made up of six dance solos, recorded in empty and ghostly historic buildings in Chile’s capital city Santiago. Casa Comun (common home) is an artistic research by British organization SDNA and Brazilian organization RR Produções Artísticas. This multicultural and multimedia collaboration with 10 multidisciplinary Amazonian indigenous artists builds on Renato Rocha’s residency in the Amazon in 2017, where he led theatrical workshops with local artists, indigenous tribes and riverside communities. There’ll also be further chances to see Synchronized Serpent, La Copla in the Amphitheatre of Quebrada de las Conchas and They Gave Me a Map (and I drew them a line).
CASA will additionally host a party at Brixton Village courtyard (Sept 16), an opportunity to meet CASA Latinx artists while enjoying live music, food and drinks.
PROMENADE PERFORMANCE
Argentinian director, playwright and visual artist Fernando Rubio invites the community of London to participate in the collective performance A minute to celebrate our dead (Sept 11 at 3pm, starting from Monochrome Studios, and Sept 18 at 3pm, starting from Brixton Village courtyard). Each participant will reconstruct the memory of a loved one or a person they miss, celebrating them through a ritual act.
FILM PROGRAMME
CASA 2021’s film programme embraces themes of loss, identity, political struggles, and timeless love. Winner of the Audience Award at Sundance 2020, Identifying Features (dir: Fernanda Valadez, Mexico/Spain, 2020 | Sept 15 at Curzon Hoxton) has enjoyed a remarkable festival run – but has not screened in cinemas in the UK until now. This UK Premiere is the tale of a mother who hasn’t heard from her teenage son since he left home months ago to cross the border into the United States: she’s asked to sign his death certificate, but cannot rest without knowing his true fate, and so begins an odyssey across contemporary Mexico. Including online Q&A with lead actress Mercedes Hernández (tbc).
In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents retroactive to 1929, rendering over 200,00 people stateless, without nationality, identity or homeland. Weaving together elements of magical realism and intimate documentary, Stateless (dir: Michele Stephenson, Dominican Republic/Haiti, 2020 | Sept 1 at Castle Cinema) tells the story of young attorney Rosa Iris and her impassioned campaign to win back citizenship for those left adrift.
A haunting and deeply personal exploration, Asphyxia (dir: Ana Bustamante, Guatemala, 2018 | Sept 8 at Genesis Cinema) sees this first-time documentary filmmaker submerge herself in the memory of her father – a political activist who in 1982, alongside 45,000 others, was detained and disappeared by Guatemala’s military.
Part ethnographic documentary, part woven drama, Lapü (dir: Juan Pablo Polanco & César Alejandro Jaimes, Colombia, 2019 | Sept 22 at Prince Charles) follows a young Wayuú woman who dreams of a reunion with her deceased cousin.
Last screened in London in 2009, CASA provides a rare opportunity to see on a cinema screen the iconic Oscar-nominated Cuban LGBTQ+ comedy Strawberry and Chocolate (dir: Tomás Gutiérrez & Juan Carlos Tabío, Cuba, 1993 | Sept 29 at Prince Charles) – the story of an unlikely friendship between a heterosexual communist and a gay counter-revolutionary, set against a backdrop of political struggles, love and betrayal.
CASA Creates
More than simply programming the most exciting artists and connecting with audiences, CASA is also a foundation for creativity and discovery. In 2019, CASA formalised a 10-year commitment to artist development and started residency programme CASA Creates. Four multidisciplinary artists have been selected for 2021: Shanti Vera, a choreographer from Mexico; Marisol Spensieri, a theatre maker from Argentina; Luiza Rocha de Paiva, a filmmaker from Brazil; Luis Bonilla, a sound artist from Colombia. On Sept 23 at Streatham Space Project will be an opportunity to see the beginnings of four new pieces of work.
