Revolution and Corporate Denial in Santiago Sanguinetti's Bakunin Sauna

Abstract:The recent play, Bakunin sauna (2018), written by Uruguayan Santiago Sanguinetti taps into longstanding political ideologies of revolution and current economic discontent in Latin America as they play out through themes and issues surrounding corporate denial. In Bakunin sauna, Sanguinetti highlights a revolutionary cycle focused on an opposition between anarchy and transnational corporate culture, which is characterized in the play as another form of colonization and denial. In the play, a group of three octogenarians (Rosa, Margarita, and Bernardo), who are former IBM employees, seek to kidnap current IBM executive, Ema, with the help of Mijaíl Bakunin, who is mechanically reproduced as a robot powered by artificial intelligence. While Sanguinetti's play revives Bakunin's ideology in an embodied form on the contemporary stage, it also invokes references to both past and current experiments with social anarchism, as well as other left-leaning political movements. Through Bakunin sauna, audiences see how denial was a foundational aspect of colonization and global economic hegemony through empire building, and see how it continues through networks of transnational power held by global corporations in contemporary settings. Spectators also witness the unfulfilled promises of revolution as movements fracture and splinter.