“La mappa e il corpo come veicoli di memoria: una rilettura de Il cartografo. Varsavia 1:400.000, di Juan Mayorga”

In The Cartographer, the playwright Juan Mayorga recovers for the present, and in an original and oblique way, some of the events that took place in the Warsaw ghetto in the first half of the 1940s. The piece makes explicit a parallelism between cartographic art and theatrical writing and at the same time translates it into practice through its own architecture. The map and the human body become there means of resistance to the impositions of History and vehicles of a memory that strives to save a part of the past and which allows to look at it with a renewed gaze and as an invisible part of the present. The historical theater advocated by Mayorga must be able to constitute itself, in the wake of Walter Benjamin, in a dialectical image, that is to determine an encounter between the present and the past that destabilizes both these poles, making the present see the past in a new light and look at himself as it hadn't done before.