ATERNO, a company founded in 2022, arrives at the Palace of Fine Arts for the first time with Permanent Transfer, a work that originated in August 2024 at the MUAC esplanade as an exercise in dissolving the boundaries between bodies, audience, and architecture. Its move to the proscenium
stage is not a repetition, but a transformation that reveals the very nature of the piece: displacement as a condition.
César Brodermann works with tired bodies—not defeated, but traveled. Bodies that carry the weight of uprootedness and seek to belong to a place, a story, a life. The choreography does not resolve that search; instead, it sustains it in the present, weaving a narrative that remains grounded in existence while suggesting a possible future. To get lost, the choreographer proposes, may itself be a form of encounter.
Eight performers do not portray characters but states of being. Their movement builds bridges that are never completed, always being crossed by others. Here lies the political dimension of the work: if migration is a misalignment between body and place, dance can transform it into language.
Getting lost ceases to be a failure and becomes choreography.
Bringing this work to the Palace of Fine Arts is not an innocent gesture. It allows displacement to inhabit a temple of permanence; it places the fragility of the constantly migrating body within marble and gold. The tension between the work’s open origins and the solemnity of the venue
rewrites it.
Brodermann offers not a finished work, but a living one, breathing through its contradictions: between fatigue and longing, exposure and stage, migration and belonging. This oscillation may be an ethics of movement in times of dispossession. It is also an invitation to imagine other ways of
being together—a future where displacement leads not to separation, but to new forms of encounter, belonging, and permanence.
