Food, farewells, religion, transition – Brazilian artist collective MEXA present The Last Supper, a performance-banquet at Leeds Playhouse, 25 Oct 2025 as part of Transform 25 Festival. We sat down and discussed with the ensemble to talk about this performance and art activism.
MEXA was formed out of activism—how does that urgency and resistance continue to fuel your art today?
I think the fact that, over the past few years, we have been able to work with art, coming from very precarious backgrounds and speaking about queer lives, is deeply political. The group has become a laboratory of practices: many people started working with us and are now developing their own projects, either as solo artists or in collaboration with other groups. For us, keeping a project like this going for more than ten years, and turning it into a permanent space for exchanging knowledge, sharing life, and creating opportunities, has always been the goal for most of us.
Why did you choose the form of a shared banquet to tell stories of memory, loss, and farewell?
In our work, it is always important for us to somehow break the distance between the audience and the performers, both inside and outside the theatrical space. One of our main questions is: how can we live together? And how can we acknowledge our differences while still being willing to sit together at the same table and try to talk about them? In this sense, since the beginning of the process of this play, we knew it was important to share food, not only among ourselves, but also with those who came to see us and who would later know and tell our story after leaving the performance. In the first part, we represent a dinner, and in the second, we live it, as a ritual, in our own way of being remembered.
How do you balance grief and joy when creating a piece that is both deeply personal and celebratory?
We are very used to farewells. Many people have left the group, disappeared, come back, and gone away again. Saying goodbye is not an exception, we’ve had to keep living while everything around us kept ending. That’s why, I think, we always balance grief and joy: it’s always contradictory. While some give up, others continue, and this is, at the same time, both sad and glorious, the simple act of being able to keep going. We also don’t want to talk only about failure and sadness, because yes, death is always around us, but we are also full of joy, nerve, and courage. This is one of the defining marks of our performances: a roller coaster of emotions, just like life itself.
What does queering iconic images like The Last Supper allow you to say that traditional narratives cannot?
All images are choices. They don’t remain in our memory by chance, they are always part of a project of remembering. It is a political decision: what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget. The Last Supper, like all iconic images, helps to create an imaginary that often appears to be the only version of a story. Yet we all know there are many versions: even the different Gospels offer contradictory accounts, depending on which apostle wrote them.
This was our starting point when we decided to look at the image of The Last Supper. Through our research, we came across a theory, supported by Da Vinci’s diaries, that he chose actors to represent the apostles. By doing so, the faces of the saints are, in fact, the faces of ordinary people. Performers, like ourselves. The original Last Supper is already deeply queer in this sense, and we feel that we are simply keeping Leonardo’s practice alive.
How does inviting the audience to eat and sit with you transform their role in the performance?
For us, it was fundamental that at some point in the show we would break representation and make the audience part of our farewell. It is their farewell too, in a way, since this group of people who sat together for almost two hours will never meet like this again. Every encounter is a goodbye, and we didn’t want to simply talk about it, we wanted people to feel it. Our desire has always been to move people, to make them move themselves while watching us.
MEXA, in Portuguese, means move. When the audience sits with us, they are no longer distant witnesses; they become part of the action, taking responsibility for the paths that unfold during and after the show.
What do you hope people carry away from this encounter with your collective and your stories?
We hope for two things to happen: that people carry our story and our memory with them, but also that they question themselves, their own images, memories, and the stories they choose to recount; that they remember what they forget. The last scene of the play is a shared table projected in the screen, where everyone becomes an apostle, together with us, because on that night, they were. Our hope is that the play functions in a dialectical way, for both us and the audience, so that we can all rethink the images together.
