“A hug to the void” arrives at the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán theater

The joint work of actress Andrea Meneses and playwright Felipe Vergara, “An Embrace in the Void”, tells the story of the actress and aerobat through different documentary tools, narrative songs and aerobatics.

Inspired by the true story of Meneses and the disappearance of his mother, the work uses different elements that dialogue with each other to create a fractional narrative that unites poetry, music and the documentary genre.

“A hug in the void” dates back to June 29, 1984, when the artist was six years old, that day her mother, Ligia María Guerrero disappeared. They don't know what could have happened to her, the facts are confusing and the people close to Meneses have different versions.

“I've always felt that there are things they want to cover up and only my dad's version seems to show something more than what he hides. However, by the time when Ligia Maria disappeared, my parents' love relationship had already ended and they had lost contact, so he doesn't have much information about what could have happened to my mother,” Meneses wrote in the text “A story full of holes”.

It is known that Ligia María Guerrero was a photographer and activist of Marxist-Leninist political groups, as well as a student and guitarist who felt threatened in her intention of building a different world. The play that her daughter is now presenting is a tribute to her and others who are in this situation.

“A hug in the void” is carried out with the support of a creation grant from the Ministry of Culture. “It is a work that seeks to investigate the social consequences of enforced disappearance, how it has served to curb the social movement, mobilization in the literal sense, the transfer from one place to another. Andrea as an acrobat serves as a metaphor for the importance of moving, when we explore movement, beauty appears, what seemed impossible appears, the great thing appears,” said Felipe Vergara.

The team that worked on the work is composed of Marcia Cabrera, Javier Ojeda, Felipe Camacho and Pablo Restrepo, as well as Vergara and Meneses. “There are few memories that I have managed to get out of the darkroom. But some kind of veiled portrait of my mother begins to appear. And then I feel the need to untangle the knots and build a story to tell; to transform the pain and mourn it. I want to carry out a kind of development process so that an image of what happened emerges from the cuvette, an image that helps me make sense of something that, of course, does not have it,” Meneses wrote.

The work is based on documentary archives of the Meneses family, “we know that it is a story full of gaps. But those gaps are worth making them visible, because the lack of information speaks of the little social importance that information has. The missing files tell us that there are some stories that want to be kept silent,” Vergara said.

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