In 1889, a family of indigenous Ona (Selk’nam), who until then had had no contact with European culture, were abducted from their native Tierra del Fuego and taken to Paris, where they were kept in a cage and exhibited as ‘Patagonian cannibals’ at the Universal Exhibition. They were subsequently taken to London and Brussels, until the Chilean authorities grudgingly agreed to repatriate them, but of the original eleven only four made it back to their homeland, where they were absorbed into the system of the Catholic missions. One of them, known as Kalapakte/Calafate, stayed behind and made it back on his own; nobody really knows how. La jaula de los onas offers an imaginary account of a peculiar Odyssey taking him from Europe to Greenland, to the Chicago Exhibition of 1893, to Buenos Aires and, eventually, to the penal colony of Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, from whence escape is possible to the territory where the Selk’nam, albeit for a brief time, still roam free.
Carlos Gamerro has published the novels Las Islas (1998, The Islands, 2012), El secreto y las voces (2002, An Open Secret, 2011), La aventura de los bustos de Eva (2004; The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón, 2015), Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara (2011), Cardenio (2016) and La jaula de los onas (2021), and the books of essays Ficciones barrocas (2011), Facundo o Martín Fierro (2015), Borges y los clásicos (2016) and Siete ensayos sobre la peste (2022). He has translated Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth into Spanish. His play El trágico reinado de Eduardo II, based on Marlowe’s Edward II, opened at Teatro San Martín of Buenos Aires in 2024.
Talk in English. Entry open to all university members and guests.