Celebrated theatremaker, filmmaker and writer Lola Arias has worked across media, form, and genre in her three decades of artmaking, but unerringly with the same central concern: those who might be represented as the outcast, the marginalised, the dispossessed – the people forgotten or silenced by history.
The Buenos Aires-born Berliner first rose to international prominence by creating pieces that allowed personal and family histories of the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile to find space on stage. She has since tackled German socialist history (Atlas of Communism), the so-called refugee crisis (Futureland), and the complexities of motherhood (Mother Tongue). In 2024, Arias won the prestigious International Ibsen Award and premiered her second feature film, Reas, on life in an Argentinian prison, at the Berlinale.
I’m interested in reenactment as a way to go back to experiences that are somehow difficult to tell.
This month, the second part of that project – a theatrical piece that follows the prisoners after incarceration – comes to Berlin. Co-produced by Maxim Gorki Theatre and 21 other European theatres, Los días afuera (The Days Out There) offers a documentary-musical framing for these cisgender- and trans women and trans men, now free, to present their own stories on stage.
When did you first know you wanted to embark on this project?
I think it’s very difficult to trace where an idea started, because I had been interested in the experience of cis women and trans people in jail for a long time. But I think there was a turning point when, in 2018, I went to the prison [in Ezeiza, Buenos Aires] for a cinema programme they did inside. I was invited to present my film, Theatre of War. And when I saw the reaction of the people inside, how much they wanted to experience some kind of artistic practice themselves, to be able to express and elaborate what they were going through, I realised that time in prison is really time wasted.
Usually, they do these workshops where they learn how to make a plastic bag, you know – things that are not useful for their lives – or they have the possibility to do a workshop to learn some skill, like how to do manicures. They don’t have so many chances to do something useful with their time and to actually elaborate on what they have been through. I thought making a workshop and an artistic project would be a way that they can somehow take distance from their own story and actually understand what they had been through.
This started as a prison workshop, then became a film, and will now hit the stage. What was that evolution like?
Originally I started with the idea of the workshop and with the potential idea of making a film. While I was doing the workshop, I realised that music was really important for them. And I met some people who were doing music inside of the prison. So actually, the idea of making a musical came from the encounter with the people inside and realising that music was a kind of art of resistance. And then I started to develop the idea of making a documentary musical film inside of the prison while they were serving their sentence. But then the pandemic came and we couldn’t enter the prison anymore. So then it shifted into making a film in a former prison with people who had been in jail.
And this is what I shot in 2022 and 2023, and what opened at the Berlinale in 2024. And while I was doing the film, the protagonists started to say, “This cannot be the end of the project – we want something more. You’re a theatre director, right? Why don’t we do a piece?” And it was that point when I started to think, okay, maybe we could do [something]. This is a kind of diptych. Reas is about the time inside. Los días afuera is about the time of freedom. One is more focused on the experience of jail, and the other one on the experience of freedom.
Do you see your work as therapeutic for your protagonists?
I’m interested in reenactment as a way to go back to experiences that are somehow difficult to tell and, in a way, to reappropriate these stories – to not let the others tell your story. To say, “This is my story. I will tell it in my own way.” And in this case, using the musical genre – which usually portrays marginal lives and criminal people in a very romanticised and aestheticised way, with beautiful actors and dancers. This is also an artistic gesture of saying, now it’s them who represent themselves. They were not these other bodies who never experienced violence at the level they experienced it, who never experienced exclusion on the level they experienced it.
These projects are not only a therapeutic work so that they can become the protagonists of their own lives and not the victims – that is one part, but this is also for society. Because we deny that there are so many centres of detention, not only in Argentina but all over the world, where people are being incarcerated – incarcerated because they had no other means to survive, because they did robbery, because they smuggled drugs out of necessity, and then we just deny that these people are people, and that they need chances afterwards. So I think it’s also something important for all of us to become aware of, because these are stories we actually don’t see. They stay behind the walls, literally behind the walls.
I [thought] it was out of my reach, because most of the people who won this prize were European men.
What did it mean for you to win the Ibsen Award earlier this year? Was it simply affirmation of the work you’ve always been doing, or did it enable something new?
When one of the jury members came to Berlin to meet me in a café to tell me I got the Ibsen Award two months before it was announced, I didn’t even know that this prize existed. So for me, it was so much out of my view, so far from my expectations, that I was like, “What is the prize?” And then she was like, “Well, you know, this prize was won by Peter Brook and Peter Handke and Heiner Goebbels.” I was like, “Wow, are you sure?” I [thought] it was out of my reach, because most of the people who won this prize were European men.
In the last years, they opened up more, and they gave it to Back to Back Theater or to Forced Entertainment, which are companies more than individuals. I’m the second woman and the first Latin American who ever got this prize, which speaks to how canon is written in theatre. I was surprised, and I was happy – not only for me, but for the other people to come, all the other women or queer people from Latin America that could be now more in focus, because suddenly the canon says, “Ah, look, there are some people from the South making something.”
How did the Ibsen Award help you to make The Days Out There?
It’s a project I really had to fight very hard to do. Even though I’ve lived in Berlin for 15 years and have done around 14 projects in Gorki, HAU and many theaters in other German cities, I’m still not supported as an artist from Berlin. I asked, but I didn’t get the basic funding to finance my company. To produce The Days Out There, I specifically asked for funding from the KSB in Berlin for international projects. And I think it’s good that you [asked] that, because I want everyone to know that they didn’t give me the money for this project! It was the first time I was asking for funding like this, and it was a project in cooperation with partners from Argentina and Germany… I needed a lot of resources, and I was desperate, because I had already committed to making the play.
I had only a third of the budget I needed. Also [Argentinian President Javier] Milei was elected in December. So the possibility of the Argentinian institution supporting the project became less and less [viable], because everything was cut the moment Milei came to power. That January was the darkest month of my life, and then suddenly this person from Norway came with this news, like an angel from the north. It gave me hope and it gave me strength. And I was like, okay, I will do it. I will find the money. I started to knock on every door. We had 22 co-producers to make this piece. That means that every European theatre had to put in a little bit of money so that we could gather all the budget we needed. And at the end the prize gave me the strength I needed to fight for this money and to make it happen.
- Maxim Gorki Theater, Am Festungsgraben 2, Mitte, Los días afuera (Sep 14 – 15, Spanish with English and German surtitles), details.
