Auditorio de Tenerife presents in its  La Salita hall Memento mori o la celebración de la muerte, by Sergio Blanco‘s company.

Continuing the autofiction trend that the Franco-Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco has been exploring for some years now, his text Memento mori o la celebración de la muerte (Memento mori or the celebration of Death) is a monologue performed by the author himself in a conference-style format. With only a desk as a stage prop and a visual projection showing a series of photographs by the famous Uruguayan photographer Matilde Campodónico, the text makes the audience participants in a show on Death that is impactful due to its incisiveness and beauty.

As the reading progresses, we will gradually discover that the captivating aspect of this original format invented by Blanco, which he describes using the term autofiction conference, is that he isn’t only talking about Death itself, but rather about the intimate way that the author experiences Death, both suffering it through pain and anguish and also experiencing it as enjoyment and pleasure. So, the text is not restricted to a predictable and comfortable condemnation of Death. Instead, it manages to revel in the celebration of a phenomenon that, according to its author, is the one that most binds us to life.

Thus, Memento mori o la celebración de la muerte is constructed as a text that approaches Death calmly, with a light touch and beauty, therefore bringing us closer to a serene idea of dying. As Blanco explains in his text: ‘Death doesn’t destroy, it immortalises: it makes us immortal. By making us enter a kind of timelessness, Death grants us a form of eternity. It takes us out of time. It tears us away from the unbearable path of the future, and thus Death makes us immortal when it falls upon us: we are no longer responsible for the present and access the realm of timelessness. Time without chronology. Non-sequential time. Time without order. Without numbers. Time that relinquishes time. ‘Death doesn’t put an end to us; it is our beginning: that is undoubtedly why I aim to be the world’s most beautiful corpse’.