january.

interviews.

January was a month for interviews. I needed to delve into the topic and create the most truthful timeline of all the things that had happened inside the toma. My intention was to tell this story just as it happened, to portray the reality of the Chilean sociocultural and political context and, therefore, to communicate the way protests are normalised in our country.

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For this, I talked with 5 different people, friends and acquaintances. Despite having personal experiences with tomas in the past, I wanted to deepen my understanding of who had lived in the toma by looking at diverse perspectives.

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I'll call these interviewees person A, B, C, D and E.

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A is a friend. She is the first person I talked to, because she was the closest friend I had that I knew was inside the occupation the whole time. She is also the person that told me the toma was happening, and therefore was the reason I was involved in the toma myself.

We spoke generally of what she remembered of the toma itself, including the assemblies and secrecy leading up to it and the most iconic moments inside the occupation. The first thing she told me about (and I think the topic I was most impacted by) was an assembly of the ‘burgeois media’ and how it was an everlasting, boring and unnecessary conflict. It was one of the very first things that was discussed when everything was settling in, and was an event that created the atmosphere which existed in the toma for the next couple of days; chaos, misunderstandings, fights of power, paranoia and stress. The questions I asked surrounded the arguments that divided the students inside of the toma: we should talk to the press outside to spread our demands, versus we should not talk to the press outside because the media is allying with the most elitist space of this country. Other events which came up in this conversation were: the moment of the Santísimo (which lasted  around 2 hours trying to solve), and the assembly where they talked whether the men should be allowed to stay or not.

B has a catholic background. We were together in the same political movement, so was familiar with the way she thinks and the opinions she usually brings into discussions. She considers herself a feminist and always relates it to catholicism, something that can be problematic for some people in the context of a toma. A had told me when talking that she remembered B’s participation in the occupation, so talking to her was the most sensible thing to do. As I told to everybody who I talked with, I wanted them to describe the whole experience of the occupation for me, or everything they could remember from it. B helped me identify three main events from Friday, a sort of chronology that guided me to structure the first act. These three main events were: the ‘burgoise media’ assembly, the Santísimo discussion and the ‘Men’s assembly’.

C is a gay man who studies law. He is my friend and we found each other the morning of the occupation working together to put up a barricade. I wanted a masculine opinion about the toma, especially because there was an important controversy whether if men should stay or not.  It was necessary for me to hear oppositional opinions and to understand the feeling of being a man in that very uncomfortable, controversial space. Regarding the historical weight that the Law School of my university had, and him being an activist from this same space, his insight on the experience would not only help me to develop the men characters of the play (which at this stage were very abstract and personally complicated to define), but also ended up helping me to direct the men actors during rehearsals. C understood that the occupation was not his space, he was there to help in anything that he was asked of, and silently questioned other men that did not understand the space the same way he did. Something he told me that stuck forever with me was the quote ‘it was very uncomfortable to be there, but it was alright to feel uncomfortable; that’s exactly how we had to feel’. This helped me to portray a male character who was conscious of his space, and I settled on C as one of the voices in the script itself.

D is an acquaintance who was mentioned by A and B, who had an important role during the occupation. When I spoke to D, she remembered the last assembly more than the first day. Before this interview I had decided to do the first act about everything that happened before the last assembly, that occurred during Sunday night –all night. So D not only gave me a full detail of the things that happened that last night; there was a faction that was making everyone vote over and over again, they made the assembly stand up and cross a line to vote, the way they cried and yelled and gave passionate speeches about the freedom for women, how they was not ever more than 10 people versus more than the other half of the assembly, how it was always the same people that spoke and the most of the assembly was always silent. She also told me her personal experience through that: how she was burnt out and ended up standing up towards the leader of the other side, how she could not control her own tears, how she broke down and was fighting outside the assembly while they were still voting inside. She was also a great story-teller. So after listening her, she helped me create a skeleton of what the end of the play would be and was the inspiration for another character in Alerta.

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E was an unexpected, but the most crucial person in these conversations. D told me I had to talk to her, and when we did, that I would understand why. Talking to E, she decided to start her story not the day or week before the actual occupation, but the year before. This was when she started having issues with the university because of a case of her own, and how she found herself having a role inside the occupation that she never thought she would have. Even though E's story did not touch the things I usually asked for (things that happened inside the assemblies, how people reacted, the discussions and arguments that were risen, the clashes of power, etc.), I understood that her role in the story was one I never thought I would need to tell, but that without it I would never have developed the script in the current for it is in. E was the person in charge of the negotiations inside the occupation, and didn't know many people inside. She usually got the jobs done and acted as a natural mediator inside the chaos of the assembly. After I heard her story, I knew I had to create a character just for her and her truth.

The conversations with A, B and C were the general and didn´t have too many personal moments inside the toma. They were able to describe little things that happened, points of view, and detailed memory of canon events of the three-day lock-in. A couple of notes I made of their conversations, while having them, were the following: