The collective
The collective what about: fuego was founded in 2020. It consists of artists from Basel, Berlin, Hannover, Puerto Varas and Santiago de Chile. The interdisciplinary and intercultural character of our group influences and shapes our collaboration. We research at the intersection of social rebellion, complex globalism and injustice. We situate our work in an intersectional feminist context. Our artistic work is not about finding political solutions. Rather, our work revolves around asking socially relevant questions together with an audience, thereby exposing global conditions and putting them up for discussion.
Our first work “Kriegsrahmen” (2021) deals with the mediatization and staging of conflict and war photographs of the last 32 years. This project was developed within the framework of the funding program “Coming Out”, a cooperation of the Schauspiel Hannover, the Theaterhaus Hildesheim and the Foundation University of Hildesheim. With “Kriegsrahmen” we were invited to the Best Off Festival in Hanover in 2022, to the Körberstudio Junge Regie in Hamburg and to the Festival Politik im Freien Theater in Frankfurt. In addition, the play was part of the digital program of the international Chilean festival Santiago OFF. In 2023, “Kriegsrahmen” was part of the “Introducing” format at the Performing Arts Festival Berlin. In the fall of 2023, the collective will open the 2023/24 season at Schauspiel Köln with the play “IM ANFANG WAR DER ZAUN”. The production seeks a performative counter-cartography of contemporary border walls.
We are Friederike Hänsel, Juan Giacaman Hasbún, Miriam Bini Schmidt, María F. Giacaman Hasbún, Linda Bühlmann and Ignacia González Torres (from left to right).
Who we are
Linda Bühlmann (*1995 near Basel) works freelance as a theater maker and visual artist. Always in a collective, her work moves between directing, scenography, dramaturgy, performance and installative as well as conceptual artistic practice. Her artistic focus is always on social spaces and negotiating political issues. She studied process design in Basel until 2018 and then staging of the arts and media in Hildesheim until 2021. She is co-founder of the art collective Politesse Publique, which has been active with performative interventions in Switzerland since 2017.
María F. Giacaman Hasbún (*1990 in Santiago de Chile) is a theatre director, performer and freelance artist. Her artistic work ranges from scenic research to performance theatre. She explores theatre as a means of collective witnessing and as a tool for analysing power structures. She studied Acting at the Universidad Católica de Chile and Arts and Media production at the University of Hildesheim on a DAAD scholarship. She is a founding member of the performance collective What About Fuego and collaborates with other freelance artists like Henrike Iglesias, Rodrigo Zorzanelli, and Ignacia González Torres.
Friedel Hänsel (*1994 in Dresden) is a theater maker and stage video designer. In her artistic practice she focuses on theater at the intersection of encounters and interaction through game mechanics, digital media, physical computing, light- and videodesign. She also develops theatre performances for and with young audiences. Friedel co-founded the chilean-german collective what about: fuego, studied scenic art and philosophy at the University Hildesheim and completed her Master degree in Spiel && Objekt at the HfS Ernst Busch in Berlin in 2024. Together with Leonie Kopineck and Vero Roza Risnovska she works in the theatre collective Gut&&Günstig.
Juan Giacaman Hasbún (*1988 in Santiago de Chile) is a sound designer, music producer and live DJ living in Berlin. He works in sound design for art exhibitions, theater pieces and experimental live shows and live performances at parties. His focus is on the attempt to develop questions via scenic means and to address them to an audience as well as to enter into a discourse with an audience on a non-verbal level. The deconstruction of structures and habits is often at the center of this.
Ignacia González Torres (*1989 in Ancud, Chile) is a director and actress. She studied acting from 2009 and completed a master’s degree in theater in Santiago de Chile in 2016. Since 2015 she has directed the theater group Compañía de teatro Persona, with which she has directed five plays and been invited to several festivals in Chile and Mexico. From 2021 to 2023, she was president of the Union of Theater Workers of the Los Lagos Region (Chile).
Miriam Bini Schmidt (*1992) is a independent theatre artist. After working in Hildesheim and Casablanca (Morocco), her creative focus is on collective work with what about: fuego. She loves post-dramaturgical approaches, critical mediation formats, freshly brewed coffee, her teaching activities at the University of Hildesheim and extensive research on political topics. She is a single mother and lives in Hanover.