La Grande-Biblioteca-Bagnata-Umida-Lubrificata-Vergognosa

“We live in a Great-Wet-Library where each Book is a House. Our city is this Great-Lubricated-Library and we live in Book-Houses. Here you can choose where you came from. Here nobody drags books around on their cracked backs, on their destroyed shoulders, on their big swollen heads, or on their overflowing asses. Nobody keeps the books that they never agreed to keep. In the Great-Wet-Soaked-Library, we can write our own legacies. We decide what goes in. Here we invent our past, our present, and our future. We decide what to bring in and how to transform it, how to transport it.”

Léa-Book-of-Shame and Mayara-Book-of-Justice invite you to their “Grande-Biblioteca-Bagnata-Umida-Lubrificata-Vergognosa”, a grotesque and playful performance in which they share in-the-closet stories, to try to answer these questions: how can we develop stories of jubilation and joyful archives from the experience of shame? What kind of knowledge is hidden in the closet? What does a collective practice of shame look like?This piece is part of a visual and performative research project that explores books, libraries, and archives as intimate landscapes. It has been developed during the 10-month residency at the Instituto Svizzero in Rome, which produces the performance for Short Theatre 2024. The fairy tales shape, influence, and disrupt the narratives with which the audience is invited to engage.Through reenactments of traumatic experiences and the creation of a whimsical, childlike universe, the performance seeks to transform shame into pleasure through embodiment and laughter.Together we can laugh until we cry, wet ourselves and feel embarrassed.