Daniela Castillo Toro et Nicolás Lange

Mi madre nada

Daniela Castillo Toro, Nicolás Lange

When the love between a mother and her daughter is expressed in the imperfect tense

Mi madre nada is a metaphorical excavation into the memory of a mother who is forgetting. In 2019, the discovery of a fragmented diary written by her mother at the onset of her illness reveals her last vestiges before oblivion. The final entry: a single vowel, the letter “A.” Confronted with this mystery, the daughter embarks on an impossible quest to recover the lost word, a quest that becomes a journey through love, pain, and absence.

Between intimate performance and visual metaphor, Daniela Castillo Toro and Nicolás Lange create a suspended space-time where two beings who love each other—a mother and her daughter—can meet beyond the everyday, through the power of imagination. It is a journey to places that no longer exist, spaces frozen in time, an exploration of language as a last refuge before erasure, an archaeology of intimacy and transmission.

Spanish with French and English subtitles

Between a mother who forgets and a daughter who searches: a last word before erasure, a quest for love through oblivion.

Company presentation

Daniela Castillo Toro is a theatre and performance artist based in Latin America. Nicolás Lange is a visual artist, writer, and curator. This co-creation brings their practices together to explore themes of memory, forgetting, and transgenerational connection through metaphorical archaeology.

This project is part of the Chile Pavilion program, co-organized by La Manufacture, the Chilean Ministry of Culture, Prochile, the French Institute of Chile, and ONDA.

Daniela Castillo Toro - Director, actress

Latin American-based theatre and performance artist Daniela Castillo Toro creates works that interrogate the mechanisms of memory, identity, and the body's relationship to history. With Mi madre nada, she undertakes an emotional and poetic archaeology, exploring how traces of forgetting become spaces of encounter and imagined resistance.

Nicolás Lange - Writer

Chilean visual artist, author, and curator Nicolás Lange develops artistic practices that connect image, text, and memory. For Mi madre nada, he wrote the foundational texts and created a visual universe that accompanies the metaphorical excavation of oblivion. His work, situated within the contemporary Latin American context, questions how art can give form to the unspeakable.

Distribution

Conception Daniela Castillo Toro et Nicolás Lange
Direction Daniela Castillo Toro
Text Nicolás Lange
Acting Daniela Castillo Toro
Sound design Ximena Sanchez Egaña
Scenography Lauren Lemaitre
Costumes Paulina Giglio Gutiérrez
Original music Tomas Gonzalez
Production: Ines Bascuñan Perez

Production

Production: Fitam
Presented as part of the Chile Pavilion, co-organized by La Manufacture, the Chilean Ministry of Culture, Prochile, the French Institute of Chile and ONDA

In the press

“We wanted a story without that aesthetic of suffering that comes with talking about illness” — Nicolás Lange.
“Finding stories is profoundly noble. It’s about using your imagination and creating metaphors” — Lange.
“I loved it when Nico suggested it be an epic.”

Diario Uchile

"I lost myself, within myself."
"And the theater wasn't enough."
"It's not about the letter that follows A, it's about what comes after me."

Culturizarte

“I didn’t know what to do with all that grief… so I started writing.”
“The beauty of theatre is that you can do the impossible.”
“A successful exercise in memory that spans the personal and the social with precision and artistic quality.”

Toda la Cultura