Jaime del Fresno (2001, Madrid) is a multidisciplinary artist who explores alternative ways of approaching knowledge and creating meaning. His practice is rooted in literary theory and performance studies, and it develops through writing and stage creation.
He investigates writing as a performative gesture that challenges the limits of expression and understanding. His writing practice proposes that writing consists of reaching a point beyond which it is impossible to advance. At that insurmountable point, writing, far from coming to a halt, delves into its negativity, becoming silence and emptiness. In this way, the text proposes a negotiation between what is written and what is unwritten, between the clear and the opaque, frustrating comprehension and suggesting that writing does not serve to generate meaning but rather to intuit a sense of meaning.
His texts present hybrid pieces that intertwine various genres, such as the personal diary, film script, poetry, and fiction. This combination of literary resources allows him to adopt different tones and strategies while also playing with the reader’s expectations. His writing practice seeks a synthesis between writing text and the act of writing itself, where the significance lies less in the finished text and more in the very act of writing.
His stage creations are a synthesis of text-based theatre and performance. His pieces propose a narrative perimeter, where different references and ideas use scenic language to engage in a unique and mysterious dialogue. His pieces offer the spectator a cryptic dramaturgy that does not invite them to solve its mysteries and symbols but rather to accompany it and surrender to an aesthetic language that challenges and confuses them.
The creation of his stage practice begins with a free combination of different aesthetic languages drawn from film, literature, music, and painting, all supported by a written text. At the same time, the texts that compose the works function as independent literary pieces, which enter into dialogue with the various narrative elements as they appear within the scenic perimeter. The relationship between text and image remains unresolved, not to offer the spectator a single, definitive meaning but to give them the possibility of imagining one. In this way, his ideas about writing and theatre are synthesized into a single practice—where theatre serves to bring the mystery of words to life.
In a present dominated by speed and instant gratification, his artistic proposals offer us the opportunity to get lost and confused. Both in his writing and his performances, he champions a fervent sense of creation, in which understanding is a concession that art can afford to bypass to propose to the audience an experience of confusion, mystery, and wonder.
To date, he has published the book Ciudades en las que no vivo (Niñosgratis, 2024) and has been included in the poetry anthology Poesía en los márgenes (Entropía Ediciones, 2021). His performances have been presented at the Instituto Cervantes in Manchester (2021) and London (2022).
