Cartas al Padre (Como perdonando al viento)

This project was born when the team at the Tamayo Museum invited us to create an activation of the piece El gran teatro (Teatro de títeres), a puppet theater painted by David Hockney, as part of the solo exhibition dedicated to him in 1984. The exhibition was titled The Great Theatre of David Hockney.

There is something mysterious about this little theater because, since that occasion, it had never been set up again; there is no record, no photograph from when it was exhibited in 1984, and it doesn’t appear in any catalog of the artist’s work. Seeing the piece, seeing the audience represented within it, made us wonder: what idea of theater did David Hockney have? And how can we relate to that idea, to that imaginary world, to the codes he proposed? What would it mean to stage a play in this little theater, within an exhibition, inside a museum, in Mexico, in 2022?

At first, we thought of making a puppet show, since that’s what the theater was built for, but then we asked ourselves: why resort to bodily mediation when the pandemic had forced us to live mediated for so many months? A bit lost, we began to explore Hockney’s vast body of work, until we came across a portrait he painted of his father (Portrait of My Father, 1955). It is clearly a work from his youth. Something mysterious connected us to that painting: the melancholic gesture, the father’s averted gaze.

We thought we saw a diffuse but important line connecting Hockney’s portrait of his father, ourselves, and the entire exhibition. It made us think about the idea of the father, the artist, the strong man, the president, and how the country is structured.

So we decided to write a letter to our fathers: ten letters written by ten members of Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol. We wanted to use the theater as a place for the real, to bring into play things that cannot be played out in life.

A place of exception. We wrote the letters separately, then had a few online readings. The first day we read them all, live, we finished with a strange, sad feeling. We stepped out onto the balcony, and there was a party going on in the house across the street; we could hear the voices of teenagers. Suddenly, the song Mi querido viejo by Piero started playing, and we took it as a sign.

Texts by: Luisa Pardo, Mariana Villegas, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, Francisco Barreiro, Sergio López Vigueras, Chantal Peñalosa, Pedro Pizarro, Toztli Abril de Dios, Carlos Gamboa, and Marcela Flores.

Performance and direction: Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol

The piece was commissioned by and premiered at the Tamayo Museum. Later, we performed variations of it at SOMA and at El Cine Tonalá, inviting more people to write letters to their fathers.

The Tamayo Museum published a book with our letters.