PROYECTO CONFESIONARIOS – Construyendo un mapa emocional de la ciudad
(PROJECT CONFESSIONALS – creating an emotional map of the city)
(2008 – 2012)

The confessional, normally understood as a reserved and private place, as a place for redemption and intimacy, here becomes an exposed one, visible to everyone.
The public sphere is confronted with the intimacy, the hidden things come into sight.

Is private confession possible in a public space?

A confessional, put in public spaces, an object that contrasts with reality, taken out of its original context. A booth where you listen to “urban confessions,” and become absorbed by the details of daily life.

A confessional is placed in determined zones of the city where a spectator sits down, but rather than making a confession, he’s here to listen to “urban confessions” in order to find the emotional tracks left by the pedestrians in their city.
PROJECT CONFESSIONALS seeks to find and trace the emotional tracks of the residents of a city, covering the urban landscape with a web of intimate memories and personal confessions, creating an alternative map – a form of emotional cartography. Through interviews and, to the extent possible, local calls for entries, “urban confessions” are compiled from city/neighbourhood residents. These concern never-told events that occurred in the determined spaces of the city, for example in a specific quarter of the city. These “confessions” don’t necessarily concern sin or immorality, but rather private, intimate occurrences that are linked to specific points in a location: a conversation at a table in that bar, a memory of a meeting in this plaza, something strange that happened at this corner.

Most important is that the confessions always have a concrete relationship to a specific space, thus creating coordinates to trace this emotional map together with the residents of this urban habitat. The confessionals are positioned in the space where these events took place, as narrated in the confessions.
They are small closed cabinets, blue in colour, covered with a transparent material, designed by set designer Hella Prokoph from Germany.

This project was performed in the following places:
– SESC Sorocaba, SP (Brazil). 2012.
– Arts Exhibition Mostra SESC de Cultura, Juazeiro do Norte, Ceará (Brazil). 2010
– Córdoba (Argentina). 2008.

CAST:
Concept, direction and dramaturgy: Ariel Dávila + Christina Ruf
Sound design and original music: Guillermo Ceballos
Set design: Hella Prokoph (Berlín, Alemania)
Set creation:
Michael Martino (Sorocaba)
Zé Cicero (Juazeiro do Norte)
Arqu. César Spalletti, Hella Prokoph (Córdoba)
General production:
Felipe França González (Difusa Fronte[i]ra) (Córdoba, Sorocaba)
George Belisario (Juazeiro do Norte)