You can't see me but it's a portrait” is a theatrical and visual fiction constructed upon meetings with Portuguese aged from 9 to 90 about their lives and their notions of community. The base created from an ensemble of interviews is transformed, expanded and connected by writing and mise-en-scène, containing simultaneously the singular imaginary of each participant and its dilution in the perspective of the whole.

Closely, each individual is between two or many, belonging to all and none, without even belonging to himself or herself. At a distance, writing is used to dress and undress characters that talk about the thirsts of this century. We ask ourselves what would happen if more than 30 people, that didn’t meet before, would get stuck in a room and have only one hour to manage their differences and get their way out of there. “You can't see me but it's a portrait” is this kaleidoscopic crossroads of real testimonies, utopias of living together, desires, ideas of community, thirst and invented rules of mechanics.
During the process of creation of this piece I discovered how much narrative - individual and collective - can function as an automatism, independently of events and will. Even the most fragmentary, non-synchronized composition will generate an atlas of meaning. It's inevitable: just like math laws ('two points are enough to determine a line'), two people are enough to form an idea of community. I tried to accept this condition by applying to dramaturgy some elements that are proper to the movement of clouds. I tried to consider the idea of community and identity as something temporary, in a permanent and un-ending movement.

Rita Natálio

After “Nothing of what we have said so far had to do with me”, also constructed upon interviews, Rita Natálio invites visual artist Luciana Fina to this project to promote a dialogue with her work around filmic portraits:

Quodlibet ens is not “being, it does not matter which”,
but rather “being such that it always matters”...
(Giorgio Agamben)

I met the persons that contributed to the research process of this work during the creation residencies, in Fundão and, months later, in Lisbon. Each person was invited to prepare her/himself for a portrait, to rethink the need, the experience, the illusion, the time of a portrait. Some of these portraits are with me in questions until on stage. Memory, desire and happening, which of these times combines the portrait? Does it speak in singular or in plural? The individual here doesn't want to signify a determined identity, by the name, by the belonging to a group or social class, or by the general absence of belonging, she/he is here essencialy to designate the singular condition of representing her/himself and being represented, to conjugate a time that we belong, in presence of her/his representation. She/he looks like, seems like, might be... “any” being, exposed singularity. In the scenic space, the full body portraits are together suggesting the restlessness of a narration, activating the hypothesis of community, not incorporated, but possible.

Luciana Fina