Invited into a research and exchange residency at Ricerca X in 2024, tying in with questions about various privileges I live with and through, I entered into a dialogue with myself as a performer of an older work of mine:

Bags (2010), in which a mute, motionless and faceless body, completely covered in sack cloth, serves as a projection screen for bystanders. 

After three weeks in Lavanderia a Vapore, working with Bags-interventions and the exchange of written and recorded testimonies, the contours of a next working trajectory became visible:

Bags & Barbaras (2025 onwards) is an investigation into the person who is in a body – in a bag.

While a motionless and faceless sack presents viewers with the challenge of interpreting what they see, a person with a face confronts us with the question of who appears in front of whom.

What do we recognise or not and how do we relate to the very appearance of the body and person we become a witness of?

Bags & Barbaras is currently evolving into a series of workshops for, and performances by bodies and people who want to collectively explore the vast field of somatic communication and negotiation on the one hand, and the monstrous presence of inequality on the other.

The workshops prepare us based on our personal needs and possibilities for moments of ritualised resonance: moments in which bodies and people are initially veiled and silently present before becoming (partly) visible and allowing processes of identification to begin.

Situations that invite others to witness arise from the sheer appearance of bodies "dropping" themselves for an hour in a location of their choosing. The dresses, which can completely enclose the body, are designed to meet individual needs and preferences. Their Its slightly transparent material offers a subtle visual orientation aid when lying under this "skin".

What unfolds as a dance of resonances follows only one rule: to stand up at least once within one hour of time. Optionally, bodies can reveal personal characteristics by partially or fully unveiling themselves, depending on how they resonate with their surroundings. The moment is considered complete with a spoken testimony from the person emerging from their disguise, but unfinished dances are also part of the series of Bags & Barbaras performances.

Witnesses can leave acoustic or visual traces of their experience with a body that simply lies there, moves, is about to stand up, or unfolds before them as a landscape.

Choreographically, the work relies on the communicative power of bodies that shift between lying down, standing, and rising. Where can a body linger? Where is it safe enough for whom to "drop ourselves" for a while without worry? When does a body rise, and why? Can we achieve a comprehensive state of awareness simply by attentively listening to bodies that carefully negotiate their position between horizontality and verticality —regardless of whether we are sitting in a living room corner, in a square in front of a museum, on the edge of a busy street, in a park, or in a studio?