Project Description:
âred roomâ takes as its focal point water, particularly its relationship with Latin America through privatization and neoliberal intervention. The personification of Water itself acts as a gender-neutral omniscient narrator, guiding us throughout the play.
In New York, we meet InÊs and Santiago, activists that find themselves pushed over the edge of the Lower East Side dam, floating in an artificial reservoir constructed above Brooklynâalongside Santiago's enigmatic gringo boyfriend, Leo.
InÊs washes up in Central America, where Subcomandante Gloria, a water guerrillera, attempts and fails to explode an American dam rerouting freshwater.
Emerging from the artificial reservoir, Santiago and Leo find themselves in D.C., in a âred roomâ: a room in the Pentagon illuminated by a Big Red Button, the logical, destructive end of Manifest Destiny. The central drama of the play coalesces in understanding neoliberalism's global violence, and the play ends, as we all could, under warm, rising tides.
Bios:
I am a Uruguayan-American (play)writer, performer, and multimedia artist based in New York City. My work situates itself at the intersection of radical queer political art, decolonial resistance, and anti-surveillance performance. I was named a John Kluge Playwright Fellow in 2019 and 2020, and my play "Eye, divisÊ(e)" was designated as a New Queer Work for the New Cosmopolitans 2020-21 season.
I am currently producing a virtual reading of my short play "freshwater grass" through the Irvington Theater Arts Incubator while finishing my final semester at Columbia University. My graduating thesis centers ecofeminist performance in Latin America, and I have recently published an article in the review "Crisol" on countervisual Latin American performance art. I also maintain a gender-neutral performance art persona named Yackie Kennedy (ig: @yackiekennedy). Hidden behind a pink wig, Yackie questions what it means to be an unidentifiable sudamericanx artist in the digital age, resisting attempts at digital consumption.
As an artist, I am wholly interdisciplinary. I weave together my anthropological training with TikTok videos, I juxtapose my grandmother's myths with radio dramas you can only pick up past midnight: in sum, a Sagittarian Latinx eco-storyteller at the cusp of the digital revolution.