Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol & Isabelle Stoffel

«Have you ever asked yourself what this landscape will look like in two hundred years? Will there still be a lake or will it have dried up? What would life be like in this city without a lake or rivers?» This is how the audio-walk «Una muerte de la que nadie habla» (A death that no one talks about) starts. Then the boat casts off. Boat? Yes, the audio walk, developed by the Mexican company together with Isabelle Stoffel, leads you partly over water. Equipped with headsets, the listeners travel with the scheduled boat from Bürkliplatz to Wollishofen while listening to a semi-fictional crime story on the topic of water, which makes a surprising connection between an eroded landscape in the South of Mexico and the basin of Lake Zurich.

The Mexican-Swiss collaboration took place on Zoom, as have most of the creative, international co-operations in the past months. The artists have never met. Not even Luisa Pardo and Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, who founded the theatre company Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol in 2003 and who both live in Mexico. Since the lockdown, they have only met on video: He lives in Mexico City, she lives in a remote village in South Mexico. Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol were scheduled to present their latest production at the 2020 festival. But, as we know, things have turned out differently. For their multi-media productions, the winners of the ZKB Patronage Prize 2011 for «El Rumor del Incendio», research at the frontiers between artistic work and everyday life and give a voice to the forgotten moments of history.

Their production for this year’s festival was only possible with a person in situ familiar with local conditions in Zurich. The Swiss actress and director Isabelle Stoffel, who has worked for several years in Spain, turned out to be the perfect partner. Together with the theatre collective Recycled Illusion she has successfully realised a series of site-specific audio walks in the past, most recently the audio walk «Kreis 5» in Zurich. The result of this transcontinental collaboration? Listen for yourself. (ll)