ABOUT THE RESEARCH

How does meat become a national sign?

In Argentina, meat is not just food: it is ritual, pride, sacrifice, boundary, celebration. It is a territory where violence and desire, work and celebration, the human and the animal, intertwine.

Continuing the trilogy on national identity started with Adentro! -a deconstruction of Argentine folk dances from the perspective of contemporary dance-, this new project delves into the symbolic and material landscapes of the meat. We are interested in looking at the body as a Surface of inscription: what bodily gestures are inherited from the gaucho, the butcher, the rural farmhand, the one who roasts? What dances can be written at the intersection of the notion of the animal's body, its flesh and fire?

The slaughterhouse appears as a founding scene: an order of bodies, a choreography of control and death. There, as a body becomes meat, a story is also organized about which bodies are edible, sacrificial or celebrable. We wonder what is hidden and what is consecrated in the ritual of the ‘asado’, what forms of masculinity are reaffirmed in the heat of the fire, what kind of nation is represented in that communion.

We are interested in exploring the boundary between the human and the animal, and imagining a scenic space where that line can redrawn. Where the body undoes its markings, decomposes, cooks, resists. Where inherited forms can break and become something else.

Meat proposes an excavation from the body: a search for the invisible choreographies that constitute us, feed us and cross us.A dance between blood, matter, work, celebration and history.

A work by Diana Szeinblum in collaboration with Pablo Castronovo, Bárbara Hang and Andrés Molina

Artistic Production: Clotilde Meeroff

Photographs: Jazmín Tesone

Video: Lorenzo Nir