Mapa Teatro
Artist in Residence at 18th Street Arts Center
Presented at 18th Street Arts Center
Presented at LACMA
(Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden)
Swiss-born, Colombia-based artists Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden founded Mapa Teatro in 1984. Since its inception, Mapa Teatro has built a universe within the living arts, a place ripe for transgressing disciplinary boundaries, fusing languages and readings, and articulating local and global concerns. Joined by Colombian artist Ximena Vargas and Mexican artist Juan Ernesto Diaz, Mapa Teatro used their studio at 18th Street as a collective space for research, questioning, and imagining.
The work of Mapa Teatro responds to the issues the artists face daily as individual citizens of Colombia, where the presence of the transnational drug war is part of quotidian experience. For the work Caída del Telón / Curtain Fall, Mapa Teatro (Colombian artists Heidi Abderhalden and Rolf Abderhalden) brought objects and archival materials from LACMA’s Bing Theater to the Fossil Lab of the nearby La Brea Tar Pits Museum, where they researched specific aspects of the theater’s history as if it were a prehistorical specimen.
