Tiziano Cruz

«My name is Tiziano Cruz and I come from San Francisco, a city in the Jujuy Province in the northwest of Argentina. Several indigenous communities have populated the country in which I spent my childhood: the At­acama, the Colla, the Guarani, the Toba, the Ocloya, the Omaguaca, the Tiliane and the Toara. ‹Soliloquy› was conceived here.» With those words, the Buenos Aires-­based artist introduces his per­formance. The piece is based on 58 letters which Cruz wrote in 2020 to his mother. She lives in his hometown, far from the Argentinian capital and its institutions of power – and inaccessible during the pandemic.

The artist uses his own life and family history to analyse society in universally valid ways. The story he tells in this haunting theatrical work talks of how the lower classes have been increasingly marginalised while indigenous bodies in a white­-dominated system have been made invisible. In «Soliloquy» Tiziano Cruz puts himself in the spot­light and asks: «What does it mean for me to cre­ate art with my body and make money from it in a world in which bodies like mine are not supposed to exist?» (af)