Mon Laferte paints at the great Chilean theater festival 50 years after Pinochet's coup

The Chilean singer Mon Laferte, during a concert in Madrid (Spain), on September 5, 2022.Aldara ZN (Redferns)

The National Stadium of Chile, used by the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship as a detention and torture center, has inaugurated this Tuesday a mural commemorating the half century of the coup d'état, which will take place on September 11 of this year.

The colorful work of the artist Mon Laferte -mainly known for her facet as a singer- and the muralist Alejandro

González has been the kickoff of the Santiago a Mil International Festival, which could not get away from the emblematic date from the prism of the performing arts.

The 30th version of one of the main Latin American theater festivals will be strongly marked by Chilean political and social memory, but it will also be a showcase for major global issues such as migratory flows and climate change.

More than 130 theater, dance, music, installation, performance and visual arts shows starring artists from 19 countries will be presented until January 31 from the northern region of Arica to southern Magallanes.

The actor and director Alfredo Castro, one of the founders of the festival that started in 1994 with just five works, explained at the opening that the regions far from the capital "have been like another country in Chile."

"What the festival has done is to integrate an entire country, it has allowed us to collaborate in an imaginary that is often very diverse between the north, the south and the center", the interpreter has stated in films such as

(2008) .

,

(2012) and

(2015).

The mural in which the singer Mon Laferte participated, inside the National State, in Santiago.

Elvis González (EFE)

The military coup will be present in national works such as

,

, or

in digital version, among others.

Carmen Romero, the festival's executive and programming director, said that there was "never again" in Chile, even with Pinochet in prison, and that is why the theater takes over "the suspensive point that the country experienced" with works inspired by that dark stage and returning again and again to wonder where the disappeared are.

The anchor woman of the cultural festival adds that all the social processes are in dramaturgy.

The 2019 revolt, for example, “was written before, during, and is still being written.

These are the themes that cross the national theater, that is why it is such an important language”, says Romero.

Castro will go on stage with the play

, premiered in 1981 by the legendary playwright Juan Radrigán.

“It was written during the dictatorship, against the dictatorship, and yet today it takes on a dimension that we never expected.

I have been perplexed listening to it because it touches on issues of feminism, private property, the Constitution, misery... it is as if Radrigán had been, -and he was, adds the actor-, a seer”.

The mural commemorating the coup in the National Stadium, which will host the Paralympic Games in November, shows the prison, the music, the woman, the disappeared detainees, the copihue (Chilean native flower), among other codes.

The muralist

González, 76, wanted to work together with Mon Laferte, 39, so that two generations could dialogue through painting about an event that marked them in a different way.

Prisoners of the seventies and even their grandchildren also participated in the painting.

“A sinister place is alive, with color.

You may like it or not, but there is a trace that has to do with the culture of life”, González said in front of the work that can be seen from September.

The artists Mon Laferte and Alejandro 'Mono' González talk during the inauguration of their mural inside the National Stadium.Elvis González (EFE)

The range of themes includes other issues of this era, such as climate change, which through the opera-performance

(Lithuania), winner of the Venice Biennale 2019, and the dance

(Kingdom Kingdom), which through Mowgli invites us to rethink the world of the future, address the environmental crisis and its impact on the new generations.

New technologies will also have their space with

and

(Spain), and the work for mobile phones

(Germany-Chile).

Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS America

and receive all the latest news in the region.