Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol

Centroamérica is a stage production, an installation, and a publication. We set out to explore a region that was to a great extent unfamiliar to us. We made several trips to the Central American region and established a research process that gradually focused on the Nicaraguan dictatorship, in particular on the stories of exiled women. The publication linked to Centroamérica operates as a kind of history manual, a contextual tool aimed at readers who cannot rely on prior knowledge of the region, and it seeks to provide a framework from which to approach the stage production.

There were multiple driving forces behind this project. On the one hand, it allowed us to talk about something other than our own selves. Generally, we artists from the Global South, are expected to talk about our own experiences—this is a common requirement in the art market. Our art has to relate to our own identity, in order to be platformed. For many years, Lagartijas worked with the history of Mexico, yet we wondered what would happen if we were to explore something that we ourselves had not experienced. To us, there lies an aesthetic interest in breaking away from this obligation.

We are neither amateur sociologists nor political theorists; and on every occasion we ask ourselves what theatre can contribute. Even though our work is rooted in reality, we often use fiction as it provides a unique space. The best way to speak about something, or to get to know someone, is often to step back a little, place oneself elsewhere, and look at things from an outside perspective. For us, this outside relates to fiction as a privileged space to observe reality, precisely because it is not reality. Theatre allows us to imagine the world in another way, opening the door to realities far beyond the often cruel reality we inhabit. We get the possibility to invent the ending of a story, or to rewrite our own.

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At Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, we generally define ourselves as a band of artists. But we are also a collective of people who, through joint artistic creation, have forged bonds of friendship, complicity, and solidarity over the course of more than 20 years. We think of the creative space as an opportunity to develop and question our own experience, viewpoint, context, and history; to ask ourselves the questions that serve as a compass, both in private life, and in the communities we belong to. Like so many others, we seek to combine work and life. To set or erase boundaries. We work with the real, but we use fiction as a means to empower stories, expand landscapes, or propose change. Ultimately, we wish to create a space for thinking, articulating, displacing, and unravelling what everyday life merges, overlooks, and presents to us as a given. Our projects are almost always converted into theatrical works, but we also produce books, radio, video, and cinema, educational programmes and curatorial projects.

We decided to form a theatre group, working from particular principles, and on urgent issues:

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We work with what we have to hand, in terms of materials, human, and economic resources, trying not to adopt production plans imported from our neighbours in the North.

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We want to be responsible for the discourses we perform as actors and actresses, writing and staging our own texts.

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We decidedly nurture internal relationships, consi-
dering that these allow us to experiment with imagining the society we seek, knowing that the roles and structures of the collective determine the processes, and must be flexible from one project to the next. We find it helpful to work with hierarchies, as long as they are not fixed.

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We plan our work for the long-term (today’s project opens up the way for that of tomorrow).

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We try to be consistent with the needs of the society in which we were born, grew up and live today, with its inequalities and tremendous injustices.

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To us, the dramatic form is not an end in and of itself. Rather, it is a starting point, a support, a guide for the stage.

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We experiment with the conventions and techno-
logies which give us our generational identity, like the cinematic language used in the performance,
for instance.

These ideas continue to be a kind of lighthouse, towards which we want to go.

We have worked with the autobiography, memory, history and the socio-political phenomena of the present (mainly on that of Mexico, though recently we have concentrated on our relationship with other territories). All is presented in documentary language, and complemented with the enchantment of fiction.

• Luisa Pardo & Lázaro G. Rodríguez, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, April 2026

Translated by Joanna Waller