Image

Epitaph

“After a long life of pondering, designing ideas, and storing them in filing cabinets, Maite was very tired. She was ninety-five years old and had already completed the list of things she wanted to do in life. She had created a theater inside a suitcase, premiered a trilogy based on her memoirs, and published a complete collection of essays on how Russian neo-constructivism influenced the neo-structuralist post-contemporary scene via postmodernism.

She gathered all her loved ones at her bedside and, as she read her favorite book, breathed her last breath.

As her body was being buried the next day, her consciousness emerged into an unfamiliar world. She found herself seated next to a huge shadow that greeted her with particular attention. From a railing, they both observed a luminous and distant world that stretched out in front of them, from which thousands of fine threads came out and ended up in their hands.

The shadow introduced herself as the Great Designer, and Maite became her assistant and, later, took her place. She had, finally, confirmed that we are nothing more than miniatures of that superior entity.”

Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image

Maite Lobos

Image

María Teresa Lobos (better known as Maite Lobos) was a theater designer trained at the University of Chile. The first play she ever saw was "Beckett o el honor de Dios" at the Catholic University Theater.

During her career as a designer, her work in "Popol Vuh" with Andrés Pérez deserves special mention, as she considered that by working with him and his team, she was able to develop the ability to work and design through experimentation, by assembling fabrics and colors on real bodies to create a costume. The Oriental imaginary proposed by Pérez became the starting point for her interest in Asian stagings, such as Kathakali and Bunraku theater, from where her personal interest in working with miniatures also arose.

She was forever dedicated to theater from an intellectual and analytical point of view. Within the world of cultural studies and focused on the visual. She developed academic and personal research on the performativity of the body and its implications, conveying this knowledge to her students in class.

She was a professor and held public offices at the School of the Arts of the University of Chile. However, towards the end, she also dedicated herself to archiving as a performative discipline and to personal and private projects based on the creation of miniatures.

One of her most interesting and undervalued achievements was devising the idea that theater work can be carried out from a thinking and analytical perspective, and not only in terms of the creative process.