In MALEZA, Mariana Villegas invites us to a replica of her apartment. We witness her daily life and become witnesses of her loneliness. From that, a fable is built in which an actress who plays the role of a tree, the least appreciated and lonely role in theater, faces one of her deepest fears by trying to live as her character.

MALEZA is the third part of a trilogy of projects that Mariana Villegas has developed as an attempt to understand herself, an attempt to review her life from the stage.

In Se rompen las olas (2012) he investigated the history of his parents and the mysterious way in which the 1985 earthquake determined his life. It was an attempt to chase away ghosts, to build a coherent narrative about their origin.

Este cuerpo mío (2017) was a project in which, through a story by Kafka, Mariana problematized what it means to inhabit a body that is outside the beauty standards dictated by society.

MALEZA (2024) closes this trilogy of investigations as a work that puts the loneliness of a woman and the life of plants in tension, between what she is and what she would like to be.

In Mariana’s words: “I am alone and at the same time I cannot be. There is the omnipresent internet as a window to the world. There are the screens and that look at the world through the pixels; getting closer to the lives of others through what they publish. Now it is very difficult to live without the awareness of seeing ourselves live. Even if we are alone we are aware of how we see ourselves or at least how we think we see ourselves. For thousands of years, humanity looked at itself in the reflection of water, mirrors were a very rare commodity and when photography appeared it was something exceptional. Today we see each other all the time, in mirrors, on the cell phone, in the zoom box. We are experts in posing. And the loneliness that was that intimate space is no longer free from the awareness of our own image.”

MALEZA seeks to resolve these concerns in the theater through an encounter with plants and their universe.

What can plants do that people can’t?