I'm sitting in the theatre. A low light comes on the stage, and two white men start arguing intensely in a language I am not sure I can identify. There is something familiar about the way it sounds. After a while, it becomes clear that it is an Indigenous language. In a country where more than two hundred Indigenous languages survive to this day, I am not able—nor is most of the audience around me, I believe—to recognize any of those languages. Among so many unfamiliar words, two terms in Portuguese emerge: regra [rule] and arma [weapon]. The actors' dialogue finishes up; in the background a man sings, and a woman pops up in the video projection, looking at us. When she comes on stage, some minutes later, she will be representing an ancient character, from a classic story, from another continent—that black woman is Antigone.

It is the production Tragédia (2019), performed by the theatre group Quatroloscinco – Teatro do Comum, from the city of Belo Horizonte. In this play as well as in others, the group uses the friction between different languages in their dramatisations. In the middle of this performance, which addresses themes such as memory and violence, the actors, gathered around a pool table, repeat the same scene three times: first in Portuguese, then in Italian, and finally in Guarani, the same language heard at beginning of the play: a language of a people who have been subject to an ongoing genocide. Guarani is also one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in South America. The scene is a dialogue about a political and electoral dispute that ends, every time, with a gunshot, and then it begins again in another language. After the third repetition, in Guarani, the scene ends with the two actors on top of the pool table, making the gesture of shooting each other. We hear two gunshots, the scene cuts, and then Antigone and her story appear.

Also in their latest production, Velocidade (2025), the group uses another language—this time sign language. In the middle of the piece—and only at that particular moment—a dialogue between a son returning from war and a father who remains silent before him, unfolds into a monologue entirely in sign language: the son tells his father about the difficulty in conveying a traumatic experience, about the holes in his wartime experience, and about the holes in his relationship with his father. Silence and gesture are enacted at radical extremes.

Thus, the group brings into play aesthetic and political aspects of the non-relation. Now, we must consider the Lacanian aphorism according to which there is no sexual relation, beyond of its direct reference to loving partnerships or to relations between men and women. After all, what is at stake is the inescapable presence in language of jouissance, in its multiple modalities—which Lacan clarifies for us with concepts such as moterialité and lalangue—as well as the hole that is constitutive of all language. Thus, the idea that there is no sexual relation offers us an important political direction, which opens onto the question of what to do with that which escapes full comprehension, the question of what it is possible to create in the face of this mismatch, of the impossibility of becoming One, like a knowing how to do with the Real.

Consequently, the way in which the theatre company addresses the critical issues of our time, treating them not only in content but in form and, teaches us a way to sustain, in the act, the conflict, tension, and gap and indicating the nature of the impossible to translate of all aesthetic experience, of all language: a nod to our work on this theme, in the many languages that, despite the limits of translation, come together and unite us at the Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis.