La Fura dels Baus in the commemoration of the Bicentennial:

a study of cultural policies

Abstract

On October 10, 2011, the central act commemorating the Bicentennial of the Uruguayan Nation-State was held in the Plaza Independencia in Montevideo. It consisted of a performative show in which an allegorical version of the two hundred years of Uruguay was represented, entrusted to the Catalan company La Fura dels Baus. This article exposes the results of a research on this political performance from the field of cultural policy studies, from a socio-semiotic perspective. The implications of the call for La Fura dels Baus and the use of performance art by the official discourse of the Nation-State as well as the link between such aesthetic-political decisions and the profile of progressive party as a partisan actor that came to occupy a dominant position in the national political system in that period. The work identifies two major nuclei of meaning proposed in the exposed narrative: the past prioritized in the two hundred years of the national historical trajectory and the characterization of the present and future projection of the Uruguayan imagined community.