El pasado es un animal grotesco

"Ten years ago I began to collect damaged photographs which a developing shop near my home threw away every month. I don't know why. A while ago the place closed, because hardly anyone now gets photos developed, and I went back to have a look at the boxes full of damaged images, blurred and discarded fragments of unknown lives. A lot of them seemed to be people of my generation, the flawed record of a decade.
I remembered a phrase from Balzac which talked about his art as the attempt to "photograph the soul of people and their times". I decided to take some of the photos and try to revive the ambitious nature of those 19th century tales, to tell the story of the lives of four people from my generation over a 10 year period, using the fragmented images as the original source material," says Mariano Pensotti (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1973), explaining the genesis of El pasado es un animal grotesco, which was premiered in March this year at the Teatro Sarmiento in Buenos Aires.

As in many of Pensotti's pieces, the audiovisual element is integral to the play's structure, giving the theatre a cinematic dimension. The stage is a circular disc which spins and divides into four spaces, each of which hosts the vital moments in the lives of these four everyday heroes. In its existential summary, imposed by the end of the decade, the characters discover how real life can end up being turned into fiction.