Mi gran obra (un proyecto ambicioso)

David Espinosa, a favourite of audiences at the Venice Biennale, has long been dreaming of a large-scale artistic action. For the time being, though, he lacks the funds for such a project and thus asked his stage designers to build a set at a scale of 1:87, small enough to fit into one single suitcase. Unless they sit in the front row, spectators attending this miniature theatre need opera glasses to follow the story.

David Espinosa is neither puppet maker nor puppet master. He finds his protagonists in the simple figurines crafted for model railways and positions them on a table: strippers, protesters, homeless people and even a Grim Reaper. Moreover, there are soccer players as well, with spectators lolling about on the sidelines. Suddenly, a small child toddles onto the pitch – and everything changes in the blink of an eye. The players kick the young boy, an exhibitionist drops his coat, a female doctor comes running but then is violently sick, and so on … Due to the overlapping scenes, the rigid, lifeless figures release emotions in surprising ways.

Espinosa’s clever subversion of the mundane entails the inevitable question: can we really be sure, do we really know everything there is to know about the simple things that surround us? Take a closer look! The world is dangerous, deceitful and rough. And everything is quite different from what we believe it to be.

This is the first performance by David Espinosa shown at Wiener Festwochen.