2020

MATERIALes

Thanks to the support provided by Fundación Williams, FNOBA (Festival Nueva Ópera Buenos Aires) is proud to introduce a pandemic-related program called “Materiales 2020”.

With the theaters and all physical spaces closed in Buenos Aires, FNOBA presents a new website that displays commissions specifically conceived, from scratch, for the virtual environment. We invite you to rediscover contemporary opera, as scraps or messages from a genre that today – more than ever – is not much more than an entelechy.

Our programme runs from September 23 to October 4, with a double component of live streaming and pre-recorded events in which sixteen artists from various disciplines interact and engage. The “materiales” are structured around three areas: Winter School (as video-classes), works in progress and, finally, premieres, all by some of the most talted young artists in Argentina. All content will be available during of the Festival, with the exception of #umweltKapital, which will only be streaming live.

2020 is the year of generalized fear, but, somewhat paradoxically, also the year we can have the most freedom in experimenting what the future of Opera might look like. In fact, we can only demand your attention today if we are cognizant of a true incongruence: Materiales 2020 is nothing but a set of ruins. Perhaps, also (as FNOBA residents Sebastián Verea and Juan Cruz Forgnone propose) 2020 could ultimately only produce a “cabinet of curiosities”: a group of strange and interesting things that can be almost touching. Their creation actually has a very charming and precise title: The Dreams of Matter (Los sueños de la materia). Indeed, what this specific piece is about is quite firm, as it deals with the organic growth of bones. These young artists perhaps think about inverting what happened to opera during 2020. Also, surely, without metaphors like these it would be more difficult for all of us (for all our tissues) to regenerate.

Miguel Galperin
Director FNOBA