FUCK ME / LOVE ME | Marina Otero

Official guest artist at ODD 2023, and making her debut appearance in Greece, is Marina Otero (born in Buenos Aires in 1984). An artist who introduces herself as “a dancer who doesn’t dance.” Who has made it her life’s work to make her own life an artwork. Who speaks heartbreakingly, side-splittingly, and deeply about both her ill-starred love affairs and her mangled spleen.

“Call it narcissistic, but who else is going to talk about me if not me?” declares Otero in FUCK ME, an autobiographical work featuring five completely naked men dancing in place of her while she explains why it is she can no longer dance, starting with the story of her grandfather and his embroilment in the Argentinian dictatorship, then speaking about the surgery she has undergone and the realization of her physical decline, before going on to talk about her passion for love and travel and life and – as ever – for the stage.

She admits that “theater was more essential than my life” and proves it with LOVE ME – a solo work which finds her motionless at first, in complete darkness, updating in front of the audience her private diary and confessions as a foreigner who migrated from her country.

The two presented works are part of the Remember to Live project, based on building an endless work about her life in which she will be her own object of investigation until the day she dies. First up is FUCK ME, then comes LOVE ME. “Yes, fuck me and then love me. First fuck me, then let’s talk about love...” – so says Marina Otero.

*LOVE ME was co-created by Marina Otero and Martín Flores Cárdenas.

“This is the Desert. The place where poems are made. My country.”
– ROBERTO BOLAÑO

“My name is Marina Otero... I am a dancer, director, author... One of my projects is to make an endless work about my life in which I am my own object of investigation. I have already presented some... ‘chapters,’ let's say, arising from that search and the idea is to continue releasing different versions of those works over time until the day I die. The previous version of this eternal project is called ‘Fuck Me.’ During the creation process, I contacted the playwright Martín Flores Cárdenas, so that he could supervise the development of the text of that work. During that process we became friends and decided to start thinking about the next work together. This is how ‘Love Me’ came about. It is the only work of this project, which I co-direct and co-write with another. In this case with him. Letting someone else intervene and distort the story, which in turn is my life, seemed natural to me... Letting someone continue when I can no longer. At this point I no longer distinguish well what is fiction in my life and what is not. Although ‘Love Me’ is correlative to ‘Fuck Me,’ it is a very different proposal: ‘Fuck Me’ is a ‘great show’ about my life... It comes from touring France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and Argentina... In huge theaters... While ‘Love Me’ is a chamber work, arising from a process in which only Martín and I participated. When we started thinking about it, the health emergency had been decreed in Argentina and the theaters were closed. We met in an independent room that Martín has in Buenos Aires, which was where we premiered the first version. The work is a solo that deals with the violence that I carry inside. In turn, the text is rewritten every time I move this tiny body. The first version of ‘Love Me’ in Buenos Aires was based on a farewell from that country of exile from which I left a few months ago. This next version that will be released in Europe are the confessions of a foreigner, of a fugitive who flees; we migrants become addicted to escaping. Our identity is the path, because the country we left no longer exists.”