EDMUNDO is a performative and multimedia monologue inspired by the first person in Chile to die of HIV/AIDS, in 1984. The piece reconstructs an inconclusive sexual/political report following the case of gay teacher Edmundo Rodríguez. Through a postdramatic exercise that fuses auto-fiction and biography, the performance crosses times, bodies and archives, interweaving voices, images and soundscapes with HIV-positive homosexual memories from a fragmented past and the fag body of the artist personifying these in the present. The work explores the stigma, silence and violence that continue to this day, from an anti-normative perspective. EDMUNDO is written, directed, and performed by Ernesto Orellana, and co-produced by Teatro SUR and GAM.
Ernesto Orellana is a queer performing artist, director, playwright, researcher and cultural manager from Chile. His work operates at the intersection of performance, post-dramatic theatre, activism and critical thought, with a sustained focus on sexual dissidence, political memory and anti-normative aesthetics. He is the founder and director of Teatro SUR and the creator of Festival DESVIACIONES, Chile’s first festival dedicated to performing arts and sexual dissidence. His artistic research, which he terms Sexo-dissident Theatre, weaves together body, archive, autobiography and multimedia technologies to generate scenes of resistance, memory and the rewriting of history from the margins.Teatro SUR is a Chilean performing arts platform and company founded in 2011, dedicated to the creation, research and production of contemporary theatre and performance from a critical, political, and sex-dissident perspective. Its work brings together body, memory, archive and multimedia technologies, developing pieces that engage with sexual dissidence, human rights and political memory in Chile and Latin America. In addition to its creative practice, it fosters training processes, residencies and community-based engagement in Santiago de Chile, consolidating itself as a space for experimentation, countercultural resistance and independent artistic production. Its works have been presented in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Cuba, Germany, the United States, Estonia, Poland and Spain.
