El puro lugar : si las paredes hablaran

In 2015, an armed commando violently stormed into a room of students violently burst into a student dormitory to brutally attack 8 of the students from the Universidad Veracruzana. The probable cause was their social and political activism. The 5th chapter of El Puro Lugar, titled "Si las paredes hablaran" (If the Walls Could Talk), was an installation about this violent attack in the room where the attack took place. For 8 days in August, 2016, it was possible to schedule visits to this space to explore the installation. Teatro Línea de Sombra has described the event in this way: "Everything that has not been said will be enunciated, not through speech, but only through gestures that contribute to the transformation of this space where atrocious violence occurred, to turn it into a space for the production of life, art, and memory. Each attendee had the opportunity to remain for half an hour in front of the objects collected throughout the process." El Puro Lugar was a site-specific project in installments that examined the past and the present in violent events in the city of Xalapa, Veracruz. This project was developed between 2015 and 2017 by Teatro Línea de Sombra in collaboration with the Organización Teatral de la Universidad Veracruzana (ORTEUV) on the basis of archival material Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

The group Teatro Línea de Sombra under the direction of Jorge A. Vargas and Alicia Laguna belongs to a new generation of independent Mexican theatermakers, who have managed to establish themselves beyond the state theater system in their country and to also have a presence on the international scene. The company was founded in 1993 by actors, directors and stage designers. It currently works in multidisciplinary teams; they work across genres and develop their pieces in collective creative processes. In most of their works Teatro Línea de Sombra deals in a critical manner with the social and political reality in Mexico. The collective organizes the TRANSVERSALES festival, which takes place every year in alternate cities in Mexico and offers a platform for contemporary Mexican theater to create connections with artists from other nations.Their projects are characteristically modular and use visceral imagery, evocative soundscapes, and semi-autobiographical fictional writing. In decades past, many important border plays opted for realistic or documentary approaches in pursuit of the universal. TLS has shaped a new dramaturgy that deploys a highly visual method and draws attention to the complex effects on individuals and communities involved in immigration restrictions, detentions, and disappearances Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics