Logo con texto "museo moderno"
Logo con las palabras escritas buenos aires ciudad
HACETE AMIGO!
Roberto Villanueva (Hernando, Córdoba, 1929 – Buenos Aires, 2005), the visionary director of the Di Tella Institute’s Audiovisual Experimentation Centre (CEA), regarded his programme’s productions as ‘test objects’. His aim was to dissolve the boundaries between artistic disciplines: ‘I made it my mission to erase the barriers between dance and mime and theatre. And I gave all the shows equal importance.’ Villanueva took under his wing young artists without any stage where to show their various, eclectic, multidisciplinary aesthetics, which renewed the experimental scene in Buenos Aires in the 1960s. Villanueva directed two landmark works at the CEA in those years: El Timón de Atenas de William Shakespeare [William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens] (1967) and Ubu in Chains (1968). More than a decade earlier, his innovative spirit and interest in the European post-avant-garde had already led him to participate in the first staging of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Argentina, directed by Jorge Petraglia. From 1978, Villanueva lived in exile, first in France, then in Spain, where he premiered the Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard for the first time in Spanish. Defining the CEA’s curatorial approach in words that might have been said today, Villanueva stated: ‘In a world on the brink of total change, a world dulled by saturation with excessive information, new tools of representation are needed.’