Supernatural stories are full of fantastic beings, inhabitants of impossible worlds that we can only dream about – or suffer in nightmares. But as in all human creation, our fantasies only tell us about our inner and everyday realities, which at times we find it imperative to escape from, even if only in our minds. Fears are part of these fantasies: in «Mujeres Desesperadas» Samantha Schweblin confronts us with a fear, the abandonment, against which a ritual, marriage, represents a promised protection.

Rituals such as this – undoubtedly loaded with fantasy – are crucial enough to define the course of our mundane destinies. However, as in every collective creation, rituals speak to us of fantasies that we internalise as we socialise, but that are not necessarily our own. And so, by losing the singularity of the individual, they introduce us into a fantastic universe that, in order not to stray from the collective, we accept as our own; even at the risk that the longed-for protection becomes asphyxiation and that the necessary escape becomes real and no longer just a fantasy.

Opera by Marcos Franciosi based on Samantha Schweblin’s short story “Mujeres Desesperadas”. Libreto by Marcos Franciosi and Walter Jakob.