La Carpa de la Reina: The Impossible Dream as Performance in Process

• In Event: Violeta Parra's Life and Legacy Reframed Across (and Outside) the Disciplines

Abstract

La Carpa de La Reina, the space that became Violeta Parra’s final artistic endeavour, and the site of her suicide in 1967, is tainted with the sense that it was ultimately a failure. The ‘Carpa’ had been an attempt by Violeta Parra’s to create her ideal creative space, where the labour of the artist would fuse with the presence and participation of her audience. The Carpa was to be a place of community, driven by her individual artistic power. Yet, the few accounts of the enterprise relate the difficulties of achieving her goals, and the ultimate and devastating artistic failure for Violeta herself. In this paper, I seek to recuperate the space of La Carpa as one of experimentation, rehearsal and process: this impossible dream derives from a sophisticated artistic and intellectual project that would, in success or failure, bring together many of the artistic threads of Violeta Parra’s life with the aim of creating a perfect performative space. I will argue that La Carpa de la Reina, set against the backdrop of changing demands on the committed artist, was a radical experiment in the development of alternative modes of performance. This radicalism is gendered and political and solitary in Chilean creative arts at the time, but above all it is a life’s work, in which ‘failure’ is central to the practice of performance, and to the process of constant rehearsal and experimentation that is at the heart of Violeta Parra’s work.

Author

• Catherine M Boyle, King's College London