BACKYARD [A FIELD TO SEARCH] | Mehr Drama! | 2026 Theatertreffen

Backyard [A Field to Search] selected for Theatertreffen 2026

Backyard [A Field to Search], a text co-written by Laura Uribe and Sabina Aldana, has been selected for the Voices of New Drama program at the 63rd Berliner Theatertreffen 2026.

The Berliner Theatertreffen is one of the most important theatre festivals in the German-speaking world. Each year it presents a selection of outstanding productions from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, alongside programs dedicated to emerging dramaturgical voices and perspectives.

The inclusion of Backyard in Voices of New Drama situates the work within an international context that reflects on contemporary writing practices and their relation to urgent political realities.

Backyard emerged in 2025 as a co-production with The Maxim Gorki Theater (Berlin) and takes shape as a performative device that articulates this trajectory: a way of thinking and engaging with forced disappearance, while also questioning the capacity of art to intervene in reality.

Laura Uribe: Backyard [Ein Suchgelände]

Enabling voices to be seen and heard that are otherwise absent in a European context also underlies Laura Uribe’s text Backyard [Ein Suchgelände], co-authored with Sabina Aldana. Since 2018 they have been searching for Mexico’s countless disappeared. They transpose their real research and their own experiences into an artistic (writing) practice that makes horrific crimes visible and gives the buried corpses a voice – as a warning, a memory, a form of resistance and as an act of solidarity. 

Reading with

Yanina Cerón, Katia Fellin, Wiebke Jakubicka Yervis

Talk between

Laura Uribe and Paula Thielecke

Selection Statement

“As one of the playwrights participating in the Berlin Theatertreffen’s Mehr Drama! it was my task to select an emerging playwright. However, in this case the assignment of roles has shifted.  

Laura Uribe’s artworks and perspective, created in co-authorship with the costume designer and art director Sabina Aldana, form the starting point of a learning process for me. I see the opportunity to highlight her work here as the extension of a queer feminist and transnational dialogue.  

The textBackyard [Ein Suchgelände]stems from an artistic practice that questions the complex tensions between representation, appropriation and empathy, and challenges the European perspective. This raises key questions that Laura Uribe deals with in political, documentary and narrative terms. 

How can someone from Europe represent realities and lived experience that are anchored in an entirely different political, historical and colonial context? And is it even possible to do so responsibly without acquiring experience? The assumption would be that a reciprocal, deeply felt empathy could lead to lived international solidarity on equal terms. A solidarity that is not based on pity but on an understanding of shared responsibility.

Laura Uribe’s tests are closely connected with the political reality of Mexico. In her artistic research, she examines the enduring violence against women and queer people along with the tireless search for the disappeared. Her work exposes the social wounds that femicide, feminicide and violent disappearance leave behind, and at the same time the large, collective, often informal structures of self-organisation, memory and resistance that counter this. 

The frequently mentioned tensions between Latin American and Western influenced, white feminism manifest themselves not only in the fact that Western discourses often overlook histories of colonial and racist violence. This criticism is not aimed against individual persons, but against a European identity that continues to have global agency. Laura Uribe’s writing shows how thinking based on solidarity can successfully be applied to the arts. Her complex analyses do not remain abstract but become aesthetically, eloquently and humorously tangible. In her texts autobiographical and documentary elements combine in an entertaining, fictional framework with interviews, research material and the voices of those who have no capacity for artistic production themselves because, for example, they have pulled their brother’s body out of a field and must spend weeks to come searching for his head, to quote Laura Uribe with an exemplary description of the material reality of everyday resistance.  

Laura Uribe’s works can be placed within an art that is progressive, political and at the same time enduring, that enables connection, community and responsibility to have a meaningful effect. Even if her works have already been presented internationally, I consider it not only imperative but ground-breaking that their protagonists should find much stronger international recognition.”

– Paula Thielecke

Performance rights Laura Uribe & Sabina Aldana, Backyard [Ein Suchgelände]  / Maxim Gorki Theater

Translated from Mexican Spanish by Franziska Muche

Read here the official press release from the website of Berliner Festspiele.