Acontecimiento y masculinidades en el arte de Lola Arias

The video installation Veterans (2014), the play Minefield (2016), and the movie Theater of War (2018), all by Lola Arias, form a body of works that explores the Malvinas/Falklands war fought between Argentina and Great Britain in 1982. While conceived, written, and directed by Arias, these works grew out of the collaboration (or the battled negotiation) between the director and six veterans of the Malvinas/Falklands war (three Argentines, two English, one Gurkha), who create memories on stage and on screen about their lives before, during, and after the war. The article focuses on the experience of these veterans turned global performers—combatants of the nation-state back then, travelers of local and global theatre and cinema festivals now. Following the deleuzian notion of event, the article explores this experimentation of art and life. It suggests that, among other transformations, the event affected the performers’ modes of being men—hegemonic masculinities fundamentally shaped by the experience of war. By creating memories of war on stage and on screen, these ex combatants paradoxically began to leave the scenario of war as a space where they inscribed themselves as men and where they intertwined their sense of identity and humanity. Through these new subjectivities, the war in the theater displaced the theater of war.