Clara Carmona
She is a puppeteer, professor of puppet theater, and specialist in object theater, interactivity, and new media at the National University of the Arts.
She is also a professor of mathematics and physics. She was a teacher for 35 years, during which she worked in secondary school management and teacher training.
She currently resides in Chos Malal, in northern Neuquén, and is part of the Compañía Títeres de la Mapu (Mapu Puppet Company), where she has worked for the past ten years with the goal of bringing theater to remote areas of the province and the country.
Within the company, she shares the roles of scriptwriter, producer, and director of all its works. She specializes in table puppets, marionettes, and giant puppets for street performances.
Her work is particularly connected to the political aspect of art. She also coordinates and participates in collective artistic interventions with a community impact, related to the climate and ecological crisis and to Nature as a subject of rights.
Sound Box (NAT Art Residence - 10/2024)
Sound Box is a performance, a theatrical proposal. It is inspired by the texts I wrote during my residency in Tagle, in the Spanish autumn, facing the Cantabrian Sea.
It premiered in the Argentine autumn, in a Patagonian forest, at the foot of Cerro Corona, in Huinganco, Neuquén province, with the desire to invite silence and the search for a fold, a crease, that contains some ancient voice stored in memory... or in the body.
My box contains unavoidable texts.
Voices. Stored for a long time.
Unrecognizable because they are so old,
They become words. They become corporeal.
They offer themselves.
In this sound box, I reveal one of my folds, I uncover a corner, I dust it off...
Perhaps you will resonate,
or at least, you will want to discover yours,
your folds.
Sound Box - Performance and Ritual
Development of the experience:
Sound Box is a performance. A ritual. A theatrical experience in which the audience isn't just a spectator, but participates, engages, and creates.
It takes place in two performing arts spaces different, also integrating the route between both:
The first is outdoor: This time, we worked in nature, in a forest, in the particularly beautiful autumn of Huinganco.
- It invites silence and encounter with the environment, with one's own body and with the other participants..
- It's about being present, perceiving one's own corporeality, the base of support, the supports, one's own weight, one's breathing.
- It is also about perceiving the bodies of others.
The second is indoors, in this case the Espacio-Minga, a small room built in wood and clay.
It's time to open the Box. It is a scenic object: a cardboard box with several interior compartments.
- Each participant is invited to choose a box. Each box contains a folded piece of paper containing a text...to be read or told to whomever it may concern. In this way, the box is passed from hand to hand and emptied.
- This ritual of random readings will lead to the writing of new texts, this time by the participants.
- To conclude, there is a collective, and at times polyphonic, reading of the "inevitable texts" of those who participated.
Huinganco-Neuquén, Sunday, April 13, 2025
Click on the images for full view
Sound Box - Digital version
In each of the boxes in this box, there's a text I wrote for you when you got here... and maybe you'd like to listen to me.
I invite you to select one, or several...or all of them. (These are some of my texts, stored inside a fold of my story.)
Now take a piece of paper, a pen and write yours.
Today, at this moment… What are your unavoidable texts?
Write them down… and start your own box.
Texts included in the audios:
1- I DON'T KNOW THIS ONE I AM NOW...
...or maybe I do… but it confuses me.
She looks a bit like the original,
But, I wouldn't say she's the same.
I have thick skin and lot of patience - they tell me -
BUT IT IS A LIE.
2- SOMEONE WRITES WITH THEIR FEET IN THE SAND
Choreography of writing
that glides in a light tempo
Andante.
Sometimes subtle. Sometimes vigorous.
He writes old words
that leave in the sand
drawings never before drawn.
He writes a legacy to his children
The barely suggested lessons
He writes what he knows is necessary
What he knows
He writes with his feet. On the sand
He draws…issues of life
He draws plants, he draws rivers
he draws horizons and deserts.
Write powerful words
That are shouted
(like the stars shout at night)
Write powerful words
that are whispered lightly
(like the breath of dawn)
Draw the kept secrets
those that you treasured
until today
when you write them, finally
in the sand.
3- HERE I AM
Here inside this little piece
Bubble
Cave
Inside
I'm
Still
Cared for
I'm
Still
I
4- I WALK
Without hiding
Lymphatic lizard, I walk
on all fours and my belly on the floor.
I am ready
5- FURIOUS SEA
let me pass
I want to wash off the filth of so long ago
If not here... where?
6- A SHELTER TO SPEND THE NIGHT
That's what I need.
A place where I can fall asleep
And rest the journey,
that has climbed onto my back.
Unsaddle, I need
Take off my saddle
And lie down in the grass
(I'm coming... I'm coming... I'll be back in a few hours)
If you want, stay here
Lie down here, right next to me...
Let's sleep a while.
7- FINDING MY VOICE
Say, sing - shout
Roar
Strip it of the hiatus
and the swellings
Shape the cavities
Tune my strings
Tense them carefully
Find the stored air
And give it way.
Let the air pass
dragging along the forgetfulness. All
Find
the scream that stuck in my gut
a long time ago
and must be ripe by now.
8- SOMETIMES I RUN DRY
I stay like this, waiting. With nothing
I become withered, without water
Until the water runs again
And wets my legs.
9- AN OLD MAN, INSIDE A LITTLE LIGHTED HOUSE
Eating slowly.
The old man looks at his plate, moves his spoon,
brings to his mouth some soup or stew
or who knows what concoction
that someone who cares for him, a wife or a daughter or who knows,
prepared for him.
The old man watches TV. He watches the news and says how bad things are in the world
he remembers his youth
he remembers his strange childhood,
some love that once moved him
He eats. Simply
perhaps later he goes to clean himself
they will accompany him to sleep, to lie down
in a clean bed. Perfumed
with clean clothes. Ironed
Maybe he'll look at the ceiling and can't sleep.
Or, he'll listen to a radio program on some station
that repeats old things,
ones he knows.
The old man will look at the sky
will look at his bedroom ceiling.
Maybe he won't be able to sleep.
Maybe simply
Slowly, slowly
Death will come to him.
and they'll find him there
lying
looking at his bedroom ceiling.
10- LITTLE COUNTRY WALTZ
Under the clear sky up above, the celebration
One two three, one two three
Triplet after triplet
on the freshly watered earth
on his haunches and with laughter at hand.
11- MEDITERRANEAN WALTZ
The beauty of gliding across the grass
Surrounding oneself with its dampness
And rolling over
ROLLING MYSELF
Filling my body with quarter notes and eighth notes
Taking you out to dance
and lightening your weight
Holding your gaze
Clean.
And find you, finally. There
12- LUCKILY, I HAD THE CLUCIDITY
to teach you
to lie down
to some melody
It came easily to you,
(it seems you already had it from some older learning)
I received it before I was born
The cub-woman
blew it on my sternum
between my ribs
I placed it in your hands
I carried you palm over palm
so you could lie down in the air
and the music simply settled
beneath you.
You let me, you allowed me everything
your little face full of laughter and trust
Now you're out there,
Uploaded to songs.
13- THIS MORNING I WENT TO THE RIVERBANK
The water began to fill me. Slowly
From the hands up
Hands, arms, chest, neck, head
Back
Hips
Legs, feet
MY skin is brown
Like the earth's
And with the water inside, it becomes transparent
I like my brown skin.
14- SILENCE IS AFTER THE SOUNDS.
Always.
It is engendered
that's why it takes a while
to clear
and become
just silence.
Mine, the one I know
is a full-corporeal silence...
Corporeal
15- FROM THE FLOOR
the earth smelled different
I liked to lie on the still warm ground
I closed my eyes and smelled.
The jasmine won out over the others
Far away, some wet weed
And further back,
a tiny bit of honeysuckle.
That´s how you´d found me when you came back.
Half drunk on smells
and smiling.
16- I LEAVE
I am a shapeless bug
Bloody.
With skin red from scratches
The hairs are dirty with shit and insects.
I'm on my way out.
hairy creature
Stinks of my own urine.
Terrified.
Shaking.
I'm on my way out.