Cultural manager, director, actor and set designer. He unites his professional career in the performing arts with a sociocultural discourse that seeks out public participation in his creative processes. His role heading the Kubik theatre in the neighbourhood Usera of Madrid, and his creative projects are a reference in the management of spaces of inclusion with the local environment and the citizens.
In 2017 he received the award Max, in the category of best private production, for “Historias de Usera” (Tales of Usera). From 2016 to 2018 he was the artistic director of the Chinese New Year in Madrid, and in 2017 the deputy director of the Corral de Comedias in Alcalá de Henares. From January 2020 on he will begin as the new deputy artistic advisor to the management of the National Drama Centre.
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Storywalker is a cultural experience based on a web platform whose contents are geolocated resounding fictions. The tales told by the popular Roman neighbourhood of Garbatella are the starting point of the creative process in line with what is called storytelling. A walk in which, through sounding fictions, carried out by Spanish and Italian playwrights and local actors, the tales of the neighbourhood in the places where they actually took place. Beyond the official history of the neighbourhood, Storywalker wants to build an inner history created by the neighbours themselves, driven by the emotive and identifiable bond and bringing the rest of the citizens closer to a new map of living experiences and sounds to be discovered. The big stories live within the everyday, the close, in the public squares, the bars, in the people who we meet outside. An experience that begins with performing arts, in particular the inheritance of radio theatre, and community, and participative theatre. Furthermore, Storywalker will be a virtual space of the memory of the neighbourhood with continuous updates, where the neighbours may upload their own stories by means of audio testimony. Two other projects were undertaken parallel to Storywalker Garbatella: one in the Llaranes neighbourhood with the city hall of Avilés (Asturias) and another with the city hall of Madrid, between the neighbourhood of Usera and the Chinese area of Qingtian where most of the neighbours of this neighbourhood are from.
This project in Rome has meant freedom to explore, to get to know the city beyond the limits of a map, of incomplete cartography that doesn’t allow the hidden faces of the outskirts be seen. To understand that walking is exploring, and exploring is continuous listening. To encourage the sense of listening, to get to the heart of the Garbatella neighbourhood and find, in its essence, the emotional life of its inhabitants. In a first phase, it was important to get lost, as a stranger having just arrived to the city, and understand the neighbourhood from the unknown, letting oneself be surprised and discovering the sounds of the day-to-day for the first time. Those sounds, belonging to the day-to-day are already internalized, absorbed, and are not given much importance. The possibility of being able to discover them, as if being a poacher of sounds, separating them from their natural habitat to locate them on a virtual map of the neighbourhood. At a second stage, I entered in a historic study of the environment itself. A documentary process, also closely tied to sound, on one side the official history of the neighbourhood, and on the other, the inner story created by the neighbours themselves with the tales of their personal stories. To be able to dive deep into these stories it was necessary to become part of the community, meaning, to participate in it and be able to understand, to share its identity beyond the official history and to generate a new reality built together. One knows they belong to a community when, upon walking down the streets, someone stops you to say hi and chat. In these months, odd is the day that I don’t stop every few steps to say hi to a neighbour of the Garbatella and continue to listen to their life stories. This is living a neighbourhood, to be able to listen and to tell their stories. And that is Storywalker beyond a web platform that geolocates audios tracks, it is an attempt to take the scene of the most intimate of a neighbourhood through stories, sounding fictions and sounds. On the other hand, the fellow grant holders have been constant accomplices of my journey towards the tales of the neighbourhood, constantly sharing walks through the interior patios of the homes, getting close to the most authentic places to chat with the neighbours. Playwrights such as Denise Despeyroux, Alberto Conejero, Pablo Remón, Pablo Fidalgo and Italian playwrights Luca Oldoni and Elena Olivieri, a fellow professional who discovered this neighbourhood to me, make this Storywalker possible. But without a doubt the most important collaborators and without whom this project would not make any sense are the men and women of Garbatella, demonstrating once more that their stories, that they live out every day, are what matter, and what best defines their neighbourhood.