The Land of Fire

Dedicated to Rebeca Ghigliotto and María Cánepa

The performance explores the concept of journey, travelling to a land rooted in the memories of a woman's imagination: a land where the fire is kept alive as a sign that a home still exists. There are references taken from Chilean past and recent history seen through the eyes of three generations of women, and stories told by different Chilean women who have gone on a journey. Some of them decided to travel; others were forced to do so. But for each one of them the journey has meant a transformation. At that point there is no difference between past and present, and the word journey gets impregnated with a deep sense of life. During Salvador Allende's government, a grand-mother and her daughter, holding a Chilean flag, occupied a plot of land to build a house and make a garden there. When the repression came, as a consequence of Augusto Pinochet's military coup, the daughter dug a deep hole in the ground and buried her uniform, papers and everything that could possibly relate her to the Communist Party. Then, over all her memories, she planted a tree.