The painter of labyrinths – Teatre Eòlia

“All children—all creatures—have fixations. Some can last four or five days, like my cousin when he announced at age four that he wanted to be a scavenger—definitely, that idea didn’t last long. Others last longer. For many years I was obsessed, for example, with dragons. Or with Doraemon. Or with Greek mythology. Or with dinosaurs. Or with Pokemon. And yes, I also spent a period of fixation on the mazes. I used to draw them, but I also liked them in all their formats. I had a wooden maze, lots of maze stories to solve – which I drew with a ballpoint pen and then lost all the fun -, maze board games… My Doraemon obsession actually overlapped with my obsession with mazes, and my favorite Doraemon movie was precisely one called Doraemon and the secret of the maze. I also remember going to Disneyland Paris as a kid, and what I liked the most out of the whole amusement park was the Alice in Wonderland maze.

You couldn’t go to Disneyland Paris every day, of course. But, luckily, in Barcelona we had one, our local labyrinth: the labyrinth of Horta. I went there many times, especially with my father. What would it be like to go back there today? I didn’t want to check it, but in this text, I imagine it. Perhaps entering it would be like entering the labyrinth of my brain, much more vast, terrifying and random than a labyrinth made of cypress trees. And perhaps we would find there the causes of this fixation on labyrinths, which is perhaps only a fixation to find the exit in a life marked by anxiety, over-demanding, loss, the need for validation and the pressure to do what needs to be done. Or maybe not, maybe we don’t find anything, in the maze, and that’s okay too, because in that case, at least the trip will help us to understand that getting lost does not have to be the purpose of finding something, but can be an end in itself.”