Museo de la Ficción

The work of artist Matías Umpierrez looks into the contemporary modes of the bonds between spectator and fiction. In this framework, his projects move around the borders that exist between performing arts, visual arts, and cinema, activating the dialectic among audience, stage, speech, scene and territory.

The first piece of Museum, Empire, is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s tragedy “Macbeth”. This version, which takes place in post-dictatorship, nineties Spain, reveals fiction as political and social mediation tool, creating a mix between entertainment industry, the current mechanisms of power, and the rage caused by the clash between tradition and globalization.

The piece EMPIRE is starring, in the main role of Macbeth, by the actress Ángela Molina, and her husband in fiction is the renowned Canadian actor and director Robert Lepage that play the original role of Lady Macbeth. The cast includes actors and actresses icons of Ibero-American cinema and theatre.

Concept of the Museum of Fiction

A museum usually preserves and exhibits objects or documents that display several aspects of human existence and its surroundings for the knowledge of present and future generations. We recognize, among others, the monographic, archaeological, natural, historical, scientific, agricultural, technical and art museums. In that last typology, we could name museums of visual arts, sculpture and painting, as well as museums of cinema, theater or television, where the tools are exposed as sole tangible witnesses of the scene, since dramatic action tends to disappear when the devise for which it was created is violated.

But… how can fiction be displayed in a museum?

The Museum of Fiction (Museo de la Ficción ®) gathers a series of performance installations, created by artist Matías Umpierrez, which look into the shift that fiction or dramatic action can provoke, in a system of museum-collection-preservation-exhibition-time. These works challenge the spatial and temporary limits of fiction in order to find a possible “museumification” or a singular way of storing a dramatic work for the present and future collective memory. It also frees the spectators from their usual passive role when it comes to fiction and gives them a fundamentally active role as the only possible link for the creation of dramatic action.

The pieces of this museum, as well as several works of its creator, will change cities, locations, conflicts and languages in order to generate a global perspective of the project. They are all dramatic pieces that were recorded to be displayed in audiovisual devices.