Vampyr

Vampyr is a mockumentary about stubborn shapeshifting creatures—half-dead, half- alive, half-animal, half-human, half-earth—that refuse to obey the mandate of the nature/culture divide. Living in unregulated wind turbine parks in Chile, these indeterminate beings exist sometimes as disoriented bats, and sometimes as exhausted night-shift workers.

A piece about energy and exhaustion, work and rest, Vampyr is a work of delirious black humour about the relationship between the non-humans (read: animals) that inhabit our territories and how we relate to their cultures when we consider humankind’s energetic projections for the future.

A critical and ironic dialogue is established between the myth of the European vampire and the reality of the Chilean hematophagous bat, a species that dies in large numbers due to wind turbines. This creation of an imagined mythology of a South American vampire presents a critical perspective on green neo-colonialism, which perpetuates practices of extraction and appropriation of colonial logic that are greenwashed under the guise of green energy production.

Vampyr is the third part of Chilean playwright and theatre director Manuela Infante’s exploration of the non-human that started with Estado Vegetal and How to Turn to Stone.