Carta Blanca a María Velasco With Nerea Barjola Ramos, Clara Serra and Tulsa
1 APR 2024 at 18:00
The play Primera Sangre is inspired by the kidnapping and infanticide of a six-year-old girl in Spain in the 1990s. An unresolved case, like other crimes committed against minors in the same decade.
María Velasco (author and director of the project, a contemporary and neighbour of the victim) echoes the frictions that, as a child, she experienced in this context: parasitic, bottom-feeding trash TV that hypersexualised women (including minors), transforming them into a body-thing. All this, in collusion with a moral discourse and a pedagogy of fear that warned of the dangers of the outside (the forest of fairy tales) and of the unknown, even if the majority of child sexual abuse takes place in the family environment.
The play is a battle, but also a cry against all the forces that seek to programme girls and transmute their vitality.
Thanks to a varied panel of speakers, this Carta Blanca offers a space for reflection on some of the themes that run through the work, from philosophical, psychiatric, journalistic, artistic and artistic perspectives. To contemplate its resonance in the present, paying attention to new forms of power and domination as well as resistance.
Moderator: María Velasco.
Participants: Nerea Barjola Ramos, Clara Serra and Tulsa
María Velasco was born in Burgos in 1984. She holds a PhD in Audiovisual Communication and a Master’s degree in Performing Arts Practice and Visual Culture.
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Her plays have been translated into Basque, Catalan, German, French, English, Italian, Serbian and Turkish, and have earned her awards such as the Accésit Marqués de Bradomín and ‘the Max Aub Theatre Award. She has also won the Heidelberger Stückemarkt International Prize and the Max Prize for Best Author. These last two awards were for Talaré a los hombres de sobre la faz de la tierra, published along with other titles in her anthology Parte de Lesiones (La Uña Rota, 2022). At the age of twenty-nine, she began her career as a producer (Pecado de Hybris) and stage director. Highlights include her productions La Espuma de los días (2019, Teatro Español / 2020, Teatre Lliure) and Talaré a los hombres de sobre la faz de la tierra (2021, 38th Autumn Festival / 2022, Sala Beckett). Velasco has also developed dramaturgies for dance companies such as Kor’sia and for interdisciplinary companies such as Les Impuxibles. With the latter he has written, among other titles, Harakiri (2022, Teatre Nacional de Catalunya / 2023, Centro Dramático Nacional).
© Ilde Sandrin
She holds a doctorate in Feminisms and Gender from the University of the Basque Country, and degrees in Political Science, and Administration and Equality from the UNED. Her lines of research have focused on representations of sexual violence against women, conceptualising them as a political project. This research process gave rise to the thesis Las representaciones del peligro sexual y su influencia en las prácticas de las mujeres a partir del crimen de Alcàsser 1992.
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In 2018 she published Microfísica sexista del poder. El caso Alcàsser y la construcción del terror sexual (Virus, 2018). Since then she has participated in numerous conferences and seminars, as well as publications. In recent years she has participated as a researcher in different projects and reports.
She currently combines the creation of essay texts with different commissioned work in relation to equality policies.
In 2021, she received the recognition in the category of “Obra para la transformación social” for Microsexista del poder, awarded by the governmental delegation against gender-based violence and the Ministry of Equality.
Tulsa is Miren Iza (Donostia, 1979), a Basque singer-songwriter who began her musical career in the late 1990s with the female punk pop group Electrobikinis. Since 2007, and under the artistic name Tulsa, she has released six albums. The songs she writes in Spanish are short stories sung with a pop heart. She is heavily influenced by women of different genres, melodic song, blues, and dream pop, from Mari Trini to Beach House, Bessie Smith and Karen Dalton.
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Her love of cinema led her to participate in several film projects, providing music for Jonás Trueba’s film Los exiliados románticos, which won the Biznaga de plata at the Malaga Festival, and Raúl Santos’ medium-length film Ignonauta. In 2007 she was nominated for a Latin Grammy for best new artist. In 2023 she will release her seventh studio album on her own label, Matxitxako, entitled Amadora.
© Aitor Laspiur