Who's Afraid of Raimunda – Stage and Film
Who's afraid of Raimunda by Josep Caballero Garcìa is a two-part project about queer iconographies:
First, it is a stage play that premiered at Kampnagel Hamburg on Oct. 22, 2021, just before Lockdown; and second, it is a film about contemporary bodies in orphaned, pandemic spaces.
The work on Who's Afraid of Raimunda once began with the exploration of a chapter from medieval Iberian history - a time when plurality of cultures and genders was tolerated before the Christians reconquered the peninsula in 1492 and expelled the Jews from Granada. Previously, for several centuries, three different cultures and religions had lived together; Al-Andalus, Jews and Christians, which together formed an extraordinary cultural hybrid. Not only did cultures intersect, but so did sexual practices. Numerous texts and poems from the time describe a queer, hedonistic Iberia and at the same time the struggle against Andalusian and Jewish homosexuality from the time of the Christian reconquest. At the beginning of the play research, the texts from Jewish, Arabic and Christian literature of the Iberian Middle Ages still read as a possible utopia, but turned out to be a homosexual, but no less patriarchal concept of relationships, in which women do not appear. That is why García's project is dedicated to "Raimunda" - whoever Raimunda is. As an allegorical figure, she stands for hidden, invisible identities eclipsed by patriarchy or other power structures, and embodies lustful resistance to repressive mechanisms of power and exclusion.
- A film in 3 episodes. (Berlin Version)
- A film in 3 episodes. (Lüneburg Version)
