La travesía de Las cautivas de Mariano Tenconi Blanco por los restos del imaginario nacional argentino

Abstracts: In this article, I examine how Las cautivas (2021), by Mariano Tenconi Blanco, rewrites the myth of “la cautiva” through a scenic dispositif that revisits the nine-teenth-century foundational archive and probes its fissures, opened by contemporary rewritings, including works by Juan José Saer and César Aira. In dialogue with Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, I argue that the production operates as a theatrical palimpsest, reorder-ing the system of signs shaped by foundational texts and their rewritings. The bodies on stage condense foreign echoes and heterogeneous temporalities that disrupt the nineteenth-century ideal of linear progress, generating a defamiliarization of language in which traits of Aira’s poetics emerge. Finally, through its intertextual engagement with El río sin orillas (1991) by Saer, the play imagines—yet ultimately frustrates— the possibility of a new origin myth in the shifting topography of the riverbanks, in dialogue with spectator theory as proposed by Marcos Pustianaz in Surviving Theatre .