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 can 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.

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 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. Their clothing, which completely covers them, allows for a muted visual orientation through a slightly transparent material.

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 (want to) resonate with their surroundings. A dance may end with a spoken testimony from the person emerging from beneath their disguise.

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? When does it 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?