Barahona had the strength of his faith – but what does Lázaro Rodríguez believe in today? Could the colonial gaze be reflected in his work as an actor? Tiburón is the story of these trips to the island. And you – do you believe?

On August 20^th, 2019, the actor Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez set out on a journey to the island of Tiburón with the intention of re-enacting what José María de Barahona experienced five hundred years earlier, on the same island. This show is the story of that journey.

José María de Barahona was a sixteenth-century missionary who travelled from Seville to the island of Tiburón, now a Mexican island in the Gulf of California. There is little evidence available to reconstruct his life; our main sources of information are the texts he himself wrote during his stay on the island, collected by Andrés Pérez de Ribas and published in his book Triunfos de nuestra santa fe sobre estas tribus, las más barbaras del norte [Triumphs of our holy faith over these tribes, the most barbaric of the North].

During his stay on the island and upon meeting the Tocáriku people, José María’s understanding of the world changed radically. These two journeys – Lázaro’s in 2019 and José María’s in the 16th century – articulate the project and provide a research framework for the three topics around which the project revolves:

1- The relationship that Mexicans living in the cities have with the past and present of the indigenous peoples who were confined within the territory that comprises the current nation-state.

What are the tensions in this relationship? How do we position ourselves, coming from territories with a colonial history and participating in societies that have oppressed indigenous peoples for centuries? What locus of enunciation do we adopt to speak about the past and the present? How has decolonisation been addressed in art? What complexities and simplifications are involved?

2- The crisis of faith in certain contemporary societies and the discrediting of the institutions that were traditionally supposed to guide it.

Is it possible to live without faith? What are the roots of faith in the society I live in? What is the relationship between faith, democracy and capitalism? Is it possible to act without believing? How can we reflect on this dimension of human experience today?

3- Action as a mechanism of knowledge and fiction as an instrument of negotiation with reality.

To what extent is action something that is lived? Why do we continue to consider fiction as subordinate to reality? To what might fiction give us access that reality forbids us? Just as we understand our country better when we move away from it, isn’t fiction the best place to understand reality?

Tiburón is part of the project La democracia en México 1965 - ...: 50 years after the publication of Pablo González Casanova's book La democracia en México (1965), we are seeking to rethink democracy in the light of his analysis, carried out half a century ago. This project is an investigation into the ideas that support the democratic ideal and the experiences that the implementation of this ideal produces. It is based on the fact that we have not one, but many experiences of democracy. More than an explanation of democracy, La democracia en México 1965 - ... is an engagement with democracy. The project is divided into 32 parts, one for each state of the Mexican Republic: 32 visions of the same country. To date, we have produced 8 projects of this cycle in different formats: 2 plays, 1 conference-performance, 1 live sound film, a video and a book.

Presentation by the Company