Lemnos in Berlin

“García Wehbi’s project is unique in concentrating on the moment of awareness in which anonymous passersby recognize their transformation into spectators. Filoctetes not only makes marginalized bodies visible but also makes city dwellers visible as spectators, and this is perhaps where Wehbi’s intervention most resembles social activism and draws attention to an ethics of spectatorship that arises amid the temptation of voyeurism and the fear of surveillance”.

“In his theater productions García Wehbi uses puppets as intervention objects, as mediators between him and the audience. Facing the question of why not use actors he responds “why would I use an actor if I can have a painless body instead”. Therefore, the puppet appears as a pain support, as representation of a suffering body, mirror of sorrow. Some spectators connected it to their personal history: a son harmed in the street and not helped in time, or themselves in a future painful misery. Mirror then, that gives back the collective and individual grief. Puppet, artist, participants and indigents are independent bodies but in the action process they seem to join indivisibly”.  

“Proyecto Filoctetes sets a group of non-human bodies around the city -dolls, as the experience’s participants called them- in situations that were all too human. Situations where the ‘excess of humanness’ consists in the abandonment, the fall , the dismay, the deprivation, and all kinds of collapses in the vast catalog of contemporary cities. Especially in crisis-hit Buenos Aires, where human bodies are scattered everywhere, strewn around in despair and destitution. They are not dead, they are at a deeply scarred moment of life and they are exposed to the silent and panicked observation of passers-by. They are discarded bodies, on the edge of being transformed into things, defying the moral order of collective perception.”