Performance OPERATIVO LIBERTAD: Hommage an Libertad Demitrópulos in CCK I From the left: Libertad Esmeralda Iocco, Sol Titiunik, Cristian Jensen und Nicolás Freda
When Libertad Esmeralda Iocco travelled to Argentina in the summer of 2022 to visit her family, she was unaware of the big celebration for the centenary of her grandmother, Libertad Demitrópulos. The Argentinian writer, who was born in 1922 and died in 1998, had worked as a teacher before moving to Buenos Aires. She married the poet Joaquín Giannuzzi in 1951. Libertad Demitrópulo’s texts confront us with a view of history that shines a light on those who are otherwise in the dark: Women, indigenous peoples.
Death painting
In the middle of the night I dream
that I am telling myself a dream in which I have died;
I see myself in three rooms and pour myself out
in different bodies, travelling through.
There my blue body yellows,
trembling in the light of sleep, as if it were open.
I am afraid to see myself and I wake him up
with this sad body, sobbing.
Behind it, my horrible dead body
that looks like a rabid dog racing,
an Easter nap and a shower of rain
It’s raining white and I’m in a desert.
God is not here yet, and who knows when.
I’m a monster and a chalchalero whistles for me.
Libertad Demitrópulos
Dear grandmother,
On your 100th birthday, we are celebrating you with a big party. We all always knew that you didn’t like stages and that you thought the prizes you were awarded were wrongly addressed. Time brought you with a new wind, and it also brought me out of Germany without knowing anything about your 100th birthday. On this special day, your poem was read in Perón’s special room, at his secret table, in front of an audience – the first time the room was open to the public.
At a certain point in your homage, your voice resounded through the windows. No intelligible words. That was your voice, completely broken by age, fatigue and pain.
…. I knew you as a child, yes, as a grandma. I don’t remember much and the little I do remember of you are the penetrating looks, the slow walk and the difficulties of the last years of your life. Later, when I was 24 years old, I got to know you as a woman through your novel. I was travelling to Ushuaia, where your book ‘Un piano en Bahía desolación’ is set. I was travelling with a friend, to the end of the world, and this book was my travel reading. I didn’t know beforehand that it was set where I was travelling.
I discovered you and fell in love and started dreaming about you in my heart, creating you and getting to know you better. And I wandered back and forth in my imagination. I wondered what your life had been like. In this way, I unravelled a gift as a legacy.
They had crossed paths, which neither you nor I would have thought: Both Libertad, both went to other countries, both with a desire for a more egalitarian and feminist society, with a certain fascination for what happens on the margins of those who make the real history, putting the focus on the voices of those who use their bodies, on those who struggle, on the oppressed. This changes the official story, that of historiography, and shifts the focus away from those who say they are ‘us’, everyone.
It couldn’t be otherwise … You chose to tell it with the elegant tone that tells the roughest stories in a poetic way …
With all love
Libertad
La Plata 30 August 2022
