MEXA: Reality Show

The residents lived under constant surveillance in a communal space where new people arrived regularly and others were quickly forced to leave due to rule violations.

Over more than a decade of working together, MEXA has changed significantly. Nevertheless, the turbulence of its origins continues to shape the group to this day.

In Reality Show, ten performers inhabit a transformable environment that evokes both a home and a television studio. Furniture and cameras gradually appear and disappear, while live projections are edited in real time. The familiar grammar of reality TV reflects both their past experiences of collective living and their current life in the theater, evoking a visibility without power, a glamour linked to exhaustion, and intimacy that becomes a commodity.

The group has decided to transform the performances into an actual reality show—in which the winner is determined through an elimination game and takes home the prize at the end of the season. In this way, MEXA reflects on its own development: on working with autobiography and documentary theater, as well as on the invention of stage personas that are only possible here.

In this way, the work sheds light on the narratives expected of a group that emerged from instability—where stories of hardship and deprivation often “win the show.” Reality Show powerfully demonstrates how people—all of them—sometimes perform versions of themselves in order to be accepted, and how high the price of this constant work on the self is. Fiction becomes a strategy for belonging and survival in labor and housing markets that demand constant visibility and self-revelation.

(Portuguese with German and English surtitles)