Victoria Szpunberg: “When I was little, we lived in a basement and on a beach clandestinely.”

BarcelonaThe family history of Victoria Szpunberg (Buenos Aires, 1973) is told through escape. They landed in Barcelona. Szpunberg was four years old and made El Masnou her home. City of Barcelona Award by The categorical imperative (2024) and author of shows such as The weight of a body (2022) and The speaking machine (2007), imagine The third escape an uprooted and banished family that draws inspiration from its own and starts over again in a new country. Starring Clara Segura, the show has made Szpunberg the first woman to direct and write a play at the Sala Grande of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. It will be there from April 24th to June 1st.

In the program you explain that The third escape It comes from a question your daughter asked. How did this happen?

— It's a coincidence. The war in Ukraine had just broken out, and it made me think of my grandfather, who was from a village in the north. This made me connect with that branch of the family. And, at the same time, my daughter entered preadolescence and started asking where our last name came from.

How have you transformed your family's story into a show without creating autofiction?

— It is true that I have a good family plot to make a show, but I am not in favor of using the I At first glance, it's a type of theatrical practice that doesn't appeal to me. I made a pact with myself: I always draw from my experience, but Victoria Szpunberg doesn't appear as the protagonist on stage. Fiction.

How has your relationship with your family changed as a result of the play?

— I don't have much contact with my family in Argentina for ideological reasons. My father [the poet Albert Szpunberg] was a very committed person; he risked his daily life, and both he and my mother put their heart and soul into the struggle within the Guevarist left. His family distanced themselves greatly, to put it mildly. Even his sister changed her last name because at the time my father was a highly sought-after figure and his entourage was in danger. Since then, relations have deteriorated.

He died in 2020Have you thought about what he would have said to you if he had been able to see the play?

— Yes, this makes me very sad and very emotional. It would be wonderful if he could see it, but in a way, there's also a connection to the fact that I'm doing it right now and to the people who are leaving us and who love us so much.

At one point in the play, a character says, "What's a last name? A string of letters." But your last name connects you precisely to your father and everything he did.

— And, besides, there are very few Szpunbergs left. In fact, one of the parts that is real is the connection between the protagonists and a relative from Brazil who acts as the narrator. The surname began with the letter xeix in the Russian alphabet, and the officers couldn't interpret it. One says it one way and the other another, but we are related. Genealogical.

The protagonists of The third escape They arrived in Barcelona completely by chance. Was that the case in your case as well?

— Not really. When I was very young, we lived in a basement for a few months and then on a beach, clandestinely, until we managed to escape to Uruguay by car. There we took a plane to Paris because my father was very familiar with Julio Cortázar and other intellectuals who had settled there. But my mother didn't speak French. After a while, we decided to come to Barcelona because the novelist Ana Basualdo was there, a close friend of my father's. We ended up in Masnou, and there I grew up with a new family, my friends, a group in which we are all children of exiles.

How do you remember that time?

— We all arrived in situations of extreme precariousness, trauma, and disorganization. The other day, a friend told me: "We had a terrible childhood, but how lucky we were that you turned it into theater." Our parents were plagued by post-traumatic stress disorder. During the dictatorship and the militancy, they lived with such high adrenaline that they didn't even realize they were putting their children at risk. And then they arrived here in El Masnou and faced financial and all kinds of problems; they had to work selling handicrafts. What was lucky for us was that they gave us a refugee card and, very quickly, citizenship.

How do you relate to your identity? A while ago you proudly said at the ARA that You are Catalan and you feel.

— I say this now because I've come to terms with many things. I've always been a questioning, self-demanding, and very critical person. But motherhood has led me to relax in many ways. I can't always be confronting my surroundings in such a direct, stressful, and demanding way. In our society, we talk a lot about the self and very little about the other; it's one of the unfinished tasks. Maturity has brought me here. Writing in Catalan has given me creative pleasure and a sense of belonging, which everyone needs.

At first, you wrote in Spanish. What happened that made you switch languages?

— I don't know if it's happened to you too: you know that feeling, when you're little, when they throw a party and don't invite you? It's very unpleasant, even though the drama is actually small, not a huge tragedy. But for them to invite you, the other person must also feel that you're eager; you have to do something. I trained and am pursuing a career here; my playwriting is deeply connected to Catalan theater. Now I feel quite involved, and that satisfies me. It's a milestone.

It's an uncommon position among artists. Many creators justify the need to write in their native language because they can't do it any other way and because they say it's easier, more comfortable, and conveys what they want to say more purely or truly.

— I don't know if comfort and purity are so necessary in writing. To begin with, I don't like the concept of purity; I'm quite a militant about impurity. As for comfort, it's a very relative topic. I prefer to speak more of a feeling of freedom. If you're insisting I write in Catalan, since I'm an irreverent person, I'll probably refuse. But if you let me choose, who's to say I can't find a very enriching and stimulating freedom in Catalan?

Eight languages are spoken in the show (Catalan, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Italian, French, English, and Portuguese). How did you work on it?

— Luckily, Albert Pijuan has a K level of Catalan, which gives me a kind of protection. He's my partner in crime and knows the Catalan language like very few others. Together, we've played and connected with dark humor and irony. When theater is a slave to rules, how boring it is. In the company, which is excellent, no one has prejudices or rigid ideas. We've had advice from Golda van der Meer for the accent and the Idex culture, Miquel Cabal for the Ukrainian and Russian accents, Romina Cocca for the Argentinian accent, and Iban Beltran for the Catalan diction.

With the Argentine and Catalan characters, some scenes border on caricature. You joke about bread with tomato, Milanese, and mate…

— Yes, I wanted to laugh, because humor is a fundamental resource and a tool for survival, even though the play deals with very difficult situations. There are scenes in which we play with certain caricature traits, but only because parody allows it. We don't deal with very intimate or psychological issues or very specific details. The protagonists could easily be from Palestine, or people who had to leave Catalonia at some point, or the Spaniards from the south who came here. All the exiles can identify with what happens on stage.

In present-day Barcelona, tourism and the migratory movement of the expats They've transformed the Catalan capital into a gentrified and globalized city. How do you relate to this whole context?

— We have a blurred vision. Sometimes we judge or stigmatize people who come to Catalonia from outside because they have nowhere to go, and yet we love having shops with signs in English and cosmopolitan, blonde people as neighbors. This is disgustingly hypocritical. I myself had to leave the apartment where I lived because they raised the rent and I couldn't afford it. It was a building on Balmes Street where we lived with families who had affordable rent. Now it's full of...expats With temporary contracts, Norwegians and Germans earning 7,000 euros a month. Barcelona has become a stage set; these people don't generate a network, and instead, they've changed the city's ecosystem. If you come from outside, you should contribute to the place you're arriving at, not colonize it.

You're the first woman to write and direct a show at the Sala Gran. Are you impressed?

— I've been working in theater for many years. I suffered more when no one listened to me and I had to tell the audience than I do now, because I know there's a whole team behind me working to communicate and promote the show. Having that privilege should be normal for artists, but it isn't. I don't want to say I deserve to be here, because many people do, but I'm reconciled with what I've done. The story we tell has meaning, and we do it with all the love, dedication, and rigor possible. Now it's up to the audience, who ultimately decide.