I'M NOT YOUNG ENOUGH
TO KNOW EVERYTHING
I was always pleasantly surprised with the collective Mondongo and its endless capacity to handcraft complex and astounding pieces, sometimes even bizarre and conceptually perplexing.
I was lucky enough to be in Buenos Aires when they presented ''I am not that young to know it all'', within the 2015 Bienal de Performance, and to be reassured of Mondongo's consistency.
The idea was to transform a commercial window, quite small and meaningless, into a sumptuous space replicating at a small scale the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. This worked as if the window had a mirror that they had crossed through to enter a world of fantasy, which nevertheless interacted with reality. My turn to see the performance was the day when a lovely mirrored-face Pinocchio distributed pieces of a celebration cake. It was surreal yet real. Pinocchio was an almighty God, taking his time to give one tiny piece of cake to each hand desperately reaching out for it.
The perspective put together in this space, technically flawless, made for a perfect dialogue between the stage design and the acting. Real arms and hands emerging from the windows, the large pie, the mirrored mask of the character conf ined within the magnificent room; every element was so well calibrated that one gave into fantasy, an action that reflected Oscar Wilde's words present in the title of the performance. The sidewalk, filled with people at night, lining up to see the incessant action behind the glass, turned us into different people. Like the hands, we became part of the performance and its mirror images.
—Liliana Porter, 2015