Violeta Gal-Rodriguez / L’Insoumise

Artist statement

My name is Violeta Gal Rodriguez, and I am a French-Chilean artist. I am the daughter of two cultures. I trained in Chile and now work in France. For the past fifteen years, since my return from Chile, I have had different theatrical and artistic experiences, all of which have in common that they explore the human, the intimate, and the word of the individual with regard to the great themes that run through our societies. I claim by my artistic acts a political theater, which is an essential engine of the projects I defend.

Through my Chilean training, I seek a complete theater on stage, which explores the body, the text, and all possible forms of artistic expression, curious about all technologies, concerned with finding the right artistic tool to exchange with the public. Through documentary theater, the form that I mainly explore, I try to create and perform works that leave room for personal words, experiences, and the truth of people, to make a universal story. When I say “I”, I say “we”.

I try to document the emotion, the life course, and all these sets that make a person, to understand what connects between people. My creations are carried by a deep need to stage, to speak about what founds our societies, in what they carry of beautiful, as of bad. Our personal stories are the symbols of what crosses our collectives. When I launch into a creation, I try to understand the individual motors, by replacing them in forms capable of speaking to all.

Until now, my creations, as my journey as an artist began, have been nourished by my own experiences, and by my questioning of myself. Double culture as double identity, relation to the exile, relation to maternity. So many spaces of life to be explored to draw a word to be given. These shows, “La mémoire bafouée”, and “Les yeux de ta mère”, were built on these personal researches, mine but also those of my team.

And from this comes my deep attachment to the sincerity of our artistic words. Today I approach my work as a “passeuse”, a person capable of collecting the states of people, of the people I meet, as much in action with them, as in the bend of a street. This material allows me to understand, to feel what connects us. I attach particular importance to working with this material in artistic creation as well as by linking it to scientific realities, by crossing my reflections with this method of understanding which is the basis of science.On stage, I deliver the result of these meetings. My desire to create is based on these realities, to create fictions, aesthetic objects full of truth.

This way of doing things comes to me from this double French and Chilean culture. Two ways of seeing the theater, of practicing it, of living it.Two ways of approaching documentary theater, very intense on one side, very reflective on the other. My collaborations are always borrowed from my links to Chile, which feed my creations and my daily work. The international aspect of the creation is an evidence for me because of this permanent exchange which is mine and of the certainty that the art is a universal vector of our universalities. I change the world. Such is the place and the role that I define for an artist. To know how to open up to others, in any circumstance, and to assume to give a strong, political, and constructed reading of the world which allows to ask the question.

What are we doing? if not being together. Having a voice? Everyone has a voice. The artist is only a voice carrier.