Late Night with Cementerio de Piñatas
Summary of performances
As of February 2026, LNwCdP had two iterations or chapters. Each iteration shows a different side of the same fictional events: the first episode of the Radio show Late Night with Cementerio de Piñatas. Side A – Objects in Transition presented the live events of the talkshow, whereas Side B – La Ley del Pollo presented the backstage of it.
Side A – Objects in Transition
The piece presents a staged reconstruction of a late-night radio broadcast centered on objects in transit to a new home: discarded, obsolete, damaged, or culturally overridden, these things are invited to narrate their own conditions. Set in a dimly lit exhibition space populated by faked paintings and technical equipment, the performance unfolds as a live reenactment of a fictional radio show that had ostensibly taken place one week earlier. The audience is positioned simultaneously as witness, listener, and archivist of an event that already belongs to the past. Through a sequence of interviews with a kitchen machine, a tape recorder, a fragment of the Berlin Wall accompanied by its certificate of authenticity, a wedding dress, and a wooden ladder (all offered zu verschenken on “Kleinanzeigen”) CdP articulates experiences of abandonment, commodification, memory loss, and enforced permanence. Between each interview, music originally composed and performed by fictional absent artists is meticulously re-performed live by CdP on the broken western-guitar and modular synthesizer. The fiction of a real radio show is completed by sponsors’ (also fictional) announcements. “Side A” critically examines how value, identity, and legitimacy are produced through narratives, documentation, and technological systems. By placing bureaucratic instruments (certificates, recordings, metadata) alongside material decay and emotional testimony, the piece draws parallels between objecthood and personhood, questioning authorship, authenticity, and the politics of remembrance. Rather than resolving these tensions, the reconstructed broadcast operates as a fragile archive: a temporary space in which marginalized voices are allowed to speak, only to be forgotten once the transmission ends.
Side B – La Ley del Pollo
The second iteration of Late Night with Cementerio de Piñatas shifts the focus from the public eyes and ears to the hidden ones. Rather than restaging the radio show itself and offering a new episode, CdP stages the backstage waiting of the show’s announcers between commercial breaks of the first episode, “Objects in Transition”. Rather than moving forward in time, we go back to the timeframe of the first episode, our characters stuck in time waiting for something that they have no idea about. This chapter foregrounds the mechanisms, contradictions, and labor conditions that make such a production possible, unfolding as a hybrid performance-installation in which different formats (concert, talk show, exhibition, advertisement, commercial relations) collapse into one another without hierarchy. A scrolling text situates the audience within an ongoing series, referencing the previous episode while reframing it as background material. The space is configured as a fragmented environment: a provisional waiting room, where the announcers wait until their time to go live and a small recording setup where they record the sponsors’ messages on the one hand, and a musical stage, where the fictional bands from episode one return to perform new pieces on the other. A fourth space, located outside the stage amongst the audience, sets up an art exhibition, which is activated during the final section. Here, the performers drop their roles as announcers/musicians in favor of that of a curator and a street salesman. Curatorial language is mobilized alongside overt attempts to sell the displayed objects. The performance concludes not with resolution, but with continued circulation: music plays, beer is served, advertisements reappear. The oscillations between these four spaces structure the piece and expose the affective economy of contemporary cultural production: anticipation, overstimulation, fatigue, and indifference. With the in-between as a leitmotiv, “Side B” abandons narrative coherence in favor of structural visibility. What was once the central content (the voices of objects in transition) is now displaced, summarized, and instrumentalized. The radio show becomes archival material within its own sequel, exhibiting the infrastructural, economic, and temporal conditions of artistic production, whilst putting meaning, artistic and otherwise, into question. Rather than offering answers, the work presents a state of productive discomfort, positioning the audience as witnesses to a system that continues operating even as its purpose remains unresolved.