ATRESBANDES Company
ATRESBANDES was born from the artistic and personal meeting of Mònica Almirall, Miquel Segovia and Albert Pérez Hidalgo. Within the training environment of the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona, all three decide to start a joint project. Since 2011 the group has grown and developed at the same time as the evocative ability of its members.
Influenced by an indigestible amount of disciplines and references specific to Western culture, the group is characterized by a single constant in its projects: advocating for a laboratory theater where the creation process is fundamental. Good understanding is one of the vertices of this triangle, but so are doubt and uncertainty. They work by questioning everything around us. This is the only engine they know.
Desert
Residency March 2023
Imagine a desert. With this phrase begins a popular psychology exercise aimed at getting to know the other person’s personality. Following the instructions, the person who performs it ends up imagining a landscape with different elements that will later be interpreted. The exercise has the appearance of an innocent game and at the same time hides the ambition to meddle in the unconscious.
The word desert hides a whole imagination behind it. It is a fundamental word in many religious and philosophical texts. For Hannah Arendt, it is a metaphor for understanding the place of the human being in the world (“the world is always a desert”). In the Bible, it represents the place where faith in God is tested, and Islam is a religion born from desert crossings in search of the divine presence. It is, in short, a word very loaded with meanings: it is almost a symbol. But a symbol that contains a great paradox: we move away from it because it represents a space empty of life and, at the same time, we look for its emptiness to come to distinguish the signs that life does not let us see.
This mixture of psychology, philosophy and mysticism is the starting point of the new project.
