My Neighbour

They often ask me why I do theater in prison. Why we insist on keeping the theater workshop alive there in the prison.

Why to accept this harshness that every day the prison imposes on us as well as all those who are there to do their part.

I found myself answering: these people here, the inmates, sooner or later will come out and will live near my house: how do I want my neighbor to be? The law authorizes us to participate in the “path of treatment” as ordinary citizens, which is then what we are in prison, with the authority that our practice has gained in the field.

We thought that if we can, then we must do it. So, for about three years I worked in prison with Moncef Aissa, a Tunisian citizen who was detained there.

Together, and starting from extremely different “cultural places”, we have made a good path. One day I leave home and who is there on the road by bike?

Moncef! I tell him, “What are you doing here? Did you escape from prison? “

“No”, he replies, “I’m free now”.

“But what are you doing just here?”

“Ah, I live here!”

On my way. Thirty meters from my house.

This is how this show was born: on the thread of the story of the many things that we found ourselves living with the theater in the prison and that made us grow, on this route that leads from Buenos Aires to Ferrara and that passes from Tunisia, a journey made of stories, Arab poems, Argentine songs, Totò, Oscar Wilde and all the unending overwhelming diversity of our respective visions.

“My neighbor” wants to narrate the construction of “a possible land, made of words, gestures and poetry” starting from the meeting of two “uprooted” two beings to whom the earth was taken away at the behest of someone else: Moncef , a detainee originally from Tunisia, and Horacio, forced into exile from his Argentina after the coup d’état of Videla. An encounter that took place in “a no man’s land” full of suffering: prison.

The cultural diversity, naturally present in the path we do in prison, and with which we have to deal even when we are two steps from our house, is the founding element not only of this show, but of a large part of our theatrical practice for over 40 years.

It is the “quid” through which we still make discoveries, we surprise, grow and nourish our imagination, we can become better men; this diversity of ours, carefully cultivated among the harsh walls of the prison and kept in our artistic collaboration, is what, through the show “My Neighbor” we want to share, to understand it better, to enter it even further, because only in sharing and throug crossing the barriers between “You and Me” we understand what we are really doing. “