Shares at La MaMa | La Moderna: Tina Modotti’s Letters From Exile

La Moderna: Tina Modotti’s Letters From Exile is a staged reading in three acts, created by Claudia Gerini and Mujah Maraini-Melehi from Tina Modotti’s letters to Edward Weston and Weston’s daybooks and diaries. Blending theater, live music, and video art, the work traces the extraordinary life of Modotti: photographer, actress, revolutionary.

Claudia Gerini and Mujah Maraini-Melehi embody different facets of Tina alongside Chris Stack as Edward Weston. Live music by jazz saxophonist Michael Hashim and visuals by video artist and anthropologist Fiamma Montezemolo create an intimate and visually charged experience.

Through letters, photographs, and her own words, Tina guides us from her arrival in America from Italy in 1913 as a seventeen-year-old immigrant, through the Hollywood of silent cinema, and into the artistic and political ferment of 1920s Mexico. From her bond with Weston to her love for the Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, we follow a life lived at the intersection of passion and politics, ending in her still-mysterious final chapter.

At its heart lies her central struggle: “I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.” La Moderna celebrates a woman ahead of her time, caught between the urgency of living and the need to create, in a world where extremism rises, ideology seduces, and resisting tyranny comes at a cost.