healing wounds through art
Director and performer Inti Barrios has found a powerful way of writing and acting to free himself from his emotional wounds and try to heal himself. In his documentary monologue go banana, he goes into details of a car accident that left him paralyzed for three years and takes us on the “two-wheeled journey of a drug-overloaded migrant” in rehabilitation.
Ms. Barrios has presented his work in Argentina and Mexico, and is currently working on staging it for a Montreal audience, distribution Go bananas in the metropolis is scheduled for 2024. Subway met her during an open house rehearsal as part of a residency at Concordia University’s Acts of Listening Lab, which ran from 1uh until January 15th.
Act with reality
“This work is a catharsis of my traumatic experience of hospitalization, rehabilitation and immigration,” explained Ms. Barrios, a former Parc-Extension resident who defines himself as an “artist” and storyteller through theatre, radio, performing arts and scenery. tell orally.
The 47-year-old artist opens his monologue by embodying the feelings of hopelessness and abandonment felt during an accident in Montreal in 2012. Then, using a wheelchair and a few projected images, he immerses us in the painful experience he went through in the hospital. setting and at the Lucie-Bruneau rehabilitation center. With crude language sprinkled with humor, he evokes several characters inspired by the patients and caretakers he meets there.
Although his work denounces the vulnerability and discrimination he experienced within Quebec’s health system, it is also a critique of health systems and migration around the world.
This isn’t just the story of my hip fracture; this is the story of several other fractures. It reflects the violent reality of a system that encourages victims of serious accidents to return to work as quickly as possible.
Inti Barrios, director and cast
His plays encourage reflection on injustice, pain, “ability” and the overuse of drugs in the health care system.
When art meets activism
“It was a shock for me to be sent to a rehabilitation center where a large number of immigrants who were seriously injured live,” said Ms. Barrios, whose work stages are closely related to organizational processes, advocacy, and her own experience as an immigrant.
I’ve been working and campaigning for migrant rights for a long time, but I’ve always done it through art.
Inti Barrios, author of documentary monologues Go Bananas
Communication graduate from Ibero-American University of Puebla, Ms. Barrios studied acting at the CasAzul School of Performing Arts in México and at the OMNIBUS Body Theater School in Montreal.
He completed his first artistic residency in Quebec in 2011 at the Center Montréal, arts interculturels (MAI), where he presented his play Maquila’s monologuerelating to the working conditions of factory workers maquiladoras.
Ms. Barrios is part of the Montreal Immigrant Worker Center’s Artists Block, where she met Koby Rogers Hall in 2012, an artist activist, currently a PhD candidate in the humanities at Concordia University.
Apart from doing the staging Go Bananas in Montreal, Inti Barrios and Koby Rogers Hall are currently collaborating on the design of the piece Remember Carmeloswho paid tribute to their friend Carmelo Monge Rosas, co-founder of the United Mexican movement for Regularization, who died in 2021.
Space for creation and expression
“As part of my research-creation work, through collaboration we are answering questions about the difference that art can make in social justice and migrants,” explained Ms. Rogers Hall, which hosted Ms. Barrios at the Acts of Listening Lab (ALLab) as part of his residency. Inti and I wanted to open up our creative process to the public to explore the energetic aspects that result from direct interaction with content.
“It was an opportunity to open up a conversation about Inti’s life experiences, but also about the relationships between his work Go Bananas and the work on Carmelo we did together”, continues Ms. Rogers Hall, who has devoted some of her research to how migrant ethics and justice practices inform artistic practice and these recent influences on social movements.
