Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s (b. 1978 in Guatemala City; lives and works in Guatemala City) Lugar de Consuelo (Place of Solace) (2020) revisits Corazón del espantapájaros (Heart of the Scarecrow), a 1962 play by dramaturg, poet, and theater director Hugo Carrillo. In 1975, during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war (1960–96), a student production of the play adapted to address political concerns was swiftly shut down by the authorities before the theater was set on fire.
Carillo’s original text remains in circulation, but the censored adaptation has not survived. Imagining what it could have been, Ramírez-Figueroa created a video and performance based on a script developed by frequent collaborator, poet, and writer Wingston González. In this version, Ramírez-Figueroa and González respond to the enduring traumas of the recent and not-so-recent past and the web of entangled inheritances, staging situations in which villains and victims mutate into one another. Like the censored version that used an existing text to address other issues, Lugar de Consuelo ponders the absurdity of irredeemable human suffering and irrecoverable loss prompted by perpetual histories of violence.
