Vaca is a duet that takes the cow—an animal emblematic of humankind’s power over the living world—as both its subject and its pretext. The piece is conceived as a study of nature, at the intersection of discourse about the animal and a sensorial relationship to it. Laughing cow, dairy cow, porthole cow, mad cow: the contemporary cow is both an organic factory and a muse of spectacle. It is everywhere—in mythology, religious imagery, art, and supermarket shelves—and humans shape it according to their desires.
The piece seeks to develop a danced ethology of the cow, sketching a portrait of a being, a temporality, and a sensation. On the edge of a landscape, halfway between documentary and fiction, VACA unfolds as an ecological fable that questions the contradictions embodied by this bucolic yet trivial figure: a living being reduced to matter.