Images by Nicolee Fox courtesy of PICA.
Pilar Mata Dupont’s 2022 exhibition Las Hormigas/The Ants included a performance piece presented weekly in PICA’s main gallery.
"Three unreliable narrators become various women in Pilar’s family and try to piece together contrasting testimonies of the past. The work interweaves impulsive improvisation, family drama, realism, live songs and experimental, absurdist performance."
Las Hormigas was different every time - with scenes added/removed and the order of scenes decided moment-to-moment by the performers. This created a fragmented, felt, poetic collection of stories about family, Argentinian politics and bodily truths.
Traversing multiple countries, performance styles and generations of women, the work powerfully revealed Pilar’s history, embodiment, vulnerability and creative vision.
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Pilar Mata Dupont
Creator/Director -
Daisy Sanders, Maree Cole, Cezera Critti-Schnaars
Co-creators and performers -
Caro Duca
Dramaturg -
Tom Hogan
Sound composition/design -
Rhiannon Peterson
Sceneographer -
Jo Paradise Lui
Lighting Designer -
Nicole Marrington
Costume Designer -
Sharon Ogle
Music consultant
“The highlight of Las Hormigas is Mata Dupont’s ever-evolving play of the same title. This astounding improvisation began as part of Mata Dupont’s family fact-finding mission and morphed into interweaving of multiple truths, expressed by proxy through three performers/co-creators, Maree Cole, Cezera Critti-Schnaars and Daisy Sanders.
Altering from week to week, each performance of Las Hormigas (2022) is a unique journey through an unreliable narrative. An intentionally uncertain start to the performance comments on the fallibility of memory and the instability of subjectivity. Repetition and reframing replicate the loops our brains get stuck in when we suffer.
By embodying her great-great grandmother through a video game avatar, Mata Dupont rewrites her family history to the point she herself might cease to exist. Beginning with disorder and ending with metamorphosis, this is an absurdist play about the impossibility of creating an objective understanding of context and history.
Political, beautiful, tragic and funny, Las Hormigas/The Ants provides a playful exploration of serious subject matter through which Mata Dupont pays homage to her family origins in an original, comedic, and self-referential critique of narrative subjectivity.”
Quotes are from Nanci Nott's ArtsHub review.