Lola Arias Barona
Profile
Lola Arias Barona Lehrbeauftragte
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Address
Berner Fachhochschule
Bern Academy of the Arts
Theater
Zikadenweg 35
3006 Bern
CV
Biography
- Lola Arias (Argentina) is a writer and theatre and film director. She is a multifaceted artist whose work brings together people from different backgrounds (war veterans, refugees, sex workers, etc.) in theatre, film, literature, music and visual art projects.
Arias’s productions blur the boundaries between reality and fiction. As Etchells writes in Re-enacting Life (2019) ”Sitting in the theatre, wandering a site-specific location or watching a film, we are inculcated into others’ narratives wound into their complexities, joys and disappointments. At the same time, we are also invited and at times confronted, in an extraordinary and acute way, to reflect on the contingencies and fragilities of our own stories, individual and collective, as well as on our shifting, unresolved relation to the precarious and dangerous machinery that is social and political history.”
Arias studied Literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and Dramaturgy at the Escuela de Artes Dramáticas (Buenos Aires) and participated in playwrights’ residencies at the Royal Court Theatre (London) and Casa de América (Madrid). In 2014 she completed the Film Laboratory workshop at the Universidad Di Tella (Buenos Aires).
Between 2001 and 2007, she wrote and directed six fictional pieces.Since 2007, she has worked in documentary theatre, creating over twelve plays in collaboration with people who have lived through different events and historical experiences.
Her first feature film Theatre of War (2018) was selected for the 68th Forum of the Berlinale Film Festival and received several prizes including the CICAE Art Cinema Award, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, Best Director Award at the 20th BAFICI Festival, the Movistar+ Prize for Best Documentary Film at Documenta Madrid and the Silver Condor Award for Best Adapted Script. Arias also created the short film Far Away from Russia (2021), commissioned by Manchester International Festival.
Her second feature film, Reas (2024), premiered at the 74th Forum of the Berlinale Film Festival. The film brings together stories of cis women and trans people who have been in prison, in a reinvention of the musical genre in documentary format, mixing the former inmates’ personal stories and experiences with music and choreography.
In the visual arts and curating field, she developed My Documents, a lecture-performance cycle where artists from different backgrounds present personal research. She also conceived the durational performance Audition for a Demonstration, a spontaneous audition for a re-enactment of a demonstration that happened in the past. She created the exhibition Stunt Double (Buenos Aires, 2016), in which four different installations rebuilt the last 40 years of Argentinian social and political history through reenactments, interviews and protest songs; and Ways of walking with a book in your hand (Buenos Aires, 2017), a site-specific project for readers in libraries and public spaces.
With Ulises Conti she released the albums Love is a Sniper (2007) and Those Who do not Sleep (2011), and with Stefan Kaegi she developed the projects Chácara Paraíso (2007), Airport Kids (2008) and Ciudades Paralelas (2010), a festival of urban interventions in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Zurich and other cities.
She has published poetry, fiction and plays
Lola Arias has received prestigious awards (Premio Konex 2014, Preis der Autoren 2018), her films have been shown in international film festivals such as Berlinale, San Sebastian and BFI, and her theatre work has been performed at festivals such as Festival d’Avignon; Lift Festival, London; Under the Radar, NY; Theater Spektakel, Zurich; and in venues including Théâtre de la Ville, Paris; Redcat, LA, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Moma Musem, NY.
