Two women, locked in a room, keep making prank calls, nonstop. Their speech delusional, comic, feministic, linguistically imaginative and intellectually paradoxical. The recipients of the calls are mostly middle-class men, who are confronted by two female vigilantes, two women who invade their lives, demanding compliance.

Their pranks are a revolutionary act against a society that stays settled in its petty habits.

The installations will be scattered around and the spectators will come across them while following their course. These will be small rituals about private and public reading and will invite the spectators to:

• tell their own stories, alone, in front of a microphone in order to inspire the writers,
• follow the stories of books that were forgotten, misplaced or never read,
• synaesthetically access the stories through the senses of smell, taste and hearing,
• set up camp by building their own reading «nest»,
• read, write and exchange secret billets-doux and messages, choose random narrative extracts from books and witness them being brought to life by the performers,
• watch the traces of former use on books transform into the personal stories of the people who owned them,
• respond to the arguments of censors,
• bring with them their favourite books and listen to their ‘music’ played by the performers,
• keep silent, whisper or cough in a library reading room,
• νoverhear the librarians talk about libraries, books and readers,
• listen to a book speak about its binding, its pages and the history unfolding therein,
• and reflect upon how the stories begin and end, before the first word and after the final full-stop.

We sometimes sing consciously. When something happens and the song brings back memories, images, words. What we have lived and said, what we’ve seen and heard. And as we sing along, it's like reclaiming all these memories again, only this time more consciously, more decisively.

Because you cannot fool songs. Memories, you change, as time goes by. You correct them, you add to them; others, as psychologists say, you invent. But songs have a life of their own. And what they carry with them comes back in a flash, before you can process it and censor it.

So along with the songs, the show is made of all the things that songs bring with them: moments from back then, pictures, conversations, as we understand them in the now: full of tenderness, shame, laughter or anger. Not just to remember the past, not to condemn it or beautify it, but to win it back, all together and everyone on his/her own. By singing it.

The stories that we tell in our performance, deal with clothes as a sign of intimacy, as a scar made by emotions, as a trace of memory. The clothes as tools for transformation. As a declaration of triumph.

It's as if there are 328 women talking... Because our material was rich and heterogeneous: we handed out questionnaires, we interviewed people, we read theses and poems, overheard conversations, browsed on the internet and the social media, flipped through magazines, listened to songs, and... and... and...

The relationship women have with their clothes is a very delicate relationship, at times ambiguous and quite often extremely revealing. It is a multi-faceted relationship: sometimes obvious and interpretable, sometimes obscure and quite difficult to figure out.

The fact is, that our sartorial choices define us: racially, ethnically, socially, morally, politically, professionally, personally, sexually. They give us prestige, or not, they reflect our ideology, they give a hint about our jobs, they express our sexuality, they reveal our ethics, they indicate where we belong to or they differentiate us...

In our show at some point, we left the clothes aside and we listened to them. Because clothes tell stories.

You come in. You see mattresses on the floor. You lie on them. You close your eyes. A voice starts to speak. Memories. Lots of them.

Fantasies. Facts. Trivia. Snippets. Stray thoughts. Do’s and Don’ts. Long forgotten.
Familiar sounds. Songs stuck in your head. Smells.

An installation/performance, inspired by Joe Brainard's book on his memories of growing up. A piece/poem that inspired many others, such as writer Georges Perec and poet Kenneth Koch, who wittingly used I remember in his attempt to teach children how to write poetry.

A politician from a wealthy family with a long history in politics, a big fortune and a lot of charm, meets, at a party, a young woman who works as a journalist. A graduate in political sciences from a well known university, she is very interested in politics. During the party, after several drinks and a solitary walk on the beach, the politician expresses his interest in the woman. Towards the end of the evening they leave the party together. While driving his car, the politician loses control and the car falls into a dark swamp and sinks into black water. He manages to escape the sinking vehicle, leaving the woman to drown.

We follow the story through her eyes - an impressionistic jumble of memories and voices from the past intersected by images from the day of her death. These images, stretched in time and constantly repeated, try to give an explanation for the tragic accident that leads to her slow and agonizing death.

A performance on the corruption of power, the meaning of atonement, as well as on our attitude towards the absurdity of a violent and unjust death.

Ilya Kabakov was born in 1933 in the Soviet Union. His early works explore such issues as the combination of words and images and the relationship between the object and its meaning. Kabakov has also developed a special interest in the seemingly ordinary and banal.

In the 1970s he created a series of Albums (1972-5). Each album has as its subject an extremely sui generis character. These unbound books symbolically recount - through texts and drawings – the fictional story of a group of artists who live on the fringes of society and whose work is not valued or recognized. The images symbolize the vision of each character-artist. Many have as subtitles comments made by his friends and relatives. The final image in each album is a blank page that announces the character’s death and each of them ends with some general comments on the whole of his wok, made by fictional commentators that suppose to represent the educated class, who are after all the ones that document and manage the “legacy” of the artist.

The personal visions of the central characters of these albums, to a great extent, refer to the history of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Moreover, the comments of intruders indicate the different levels of misinterpretation and misunderstanding that any work of art inevitably is exposed to. These albums, nevertheless, are uniquely poetic, full of passion and executed with impressive precision and care.

This is the way Kabakov chose to balance the lack of a real audience for his artistic creation, however this imaginary audience as presented in the albums show no deeper understanding of art. Their interpretations can multiply infinitely and the meaning of the work is lost in this eternal process. Strangely this boosts the artist optimism rather than making him feel pessimistic. The artist seeks the spectator’s attention, though not his interpretative control. Kabakov by incorporating into the work the comments that this may generate enables it to attract the spectator’s attention without being left to its mercy.

In the albums Kabakov dealt with this mixture of hope and fear while awaiting the new viewer, the future “environment”, the acceptance by a stranger. This anticipation creates hope: “the next perspective viewer may understand the work better than his contemporaries”… He may bring the artist the attention, love and admiration his immediate environment does not offer. Along with hope there is fear that this new viewer probably does not understand the work and considers it unnecessary, and only of possible sentimental value to the artist and his immediate circle.

Kabakov’s works operate simultaneously on multiple levels: they mislead our emotions while at the same time torment our intelligence, entertain us, control us and enchant us. Our performance works on all these levels by inviting the audience to actively be a witness, sometimes as the protagonist, sometimes as an accomplice or as a commentator of the theatrical act and sometimes as a mere spectator, something that the artist himself seeks to achieve through his work.

Additionally we have used some of Tim Burton's poems (The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories) as lyrics for musical interludes.

It is exactly as it happens in our dreams, where time does not depend on the clock and no longer has the linear form of the motion of the elevator, but resembles the shape of a spiral staircase.

As the little girl in our story says.

We went up and down the stairs more than once. Reacting to two short stories by Haruki Murakami, we listened to physicists, psychologists and poets talking about time and coincidences. But we mostly talked with friends, relatives, colleagues and with each other. We entered more personal territories, we were surprised by what we remembered and remembered what surprised us. We stumbled across the spoonerisms and blunders that we would love to forget, the moments when we accidentally or miraculously received a gift or got a fright.

We came to the conclusion that people are thirsty for gifts and frights. Thirsty for stories that do not have a linear development, stories which do not necessarily explain everything and stories that leave a “question mark” lingering on...

Likewise, we do not take a final stance. Having faith in our instinct, we are not afraid of contradictions. We lay heterogeneous things side by side and we let ourselves trust the body, the image and the rhythm. In the end, we may find something that looks like an elephant or an umbrella. But, when we find it, we will feel certain that this is what we have been looking for, all along.

The performance Is everything I have ever forgotten as big as a house? is a barrage of questions that refer to the human condition. They are questions that we all inevitably ask ourselves at some point in our lives. They are "major" and "minor" questions, of a philosophical nature or not. They are questions that talk about love, fear, loneliness, the need to belong, the thirst for power, and about how people exploit each other.

We draw our inspiration from an installation by Peter Fischli and David Weiss entitled "Questions". Then, quite naturally, other texts on the same topic came our way. Thus, we met John Cage, Ben Vautier and Forced Entertainment and we felt that we all have something in common: the need to ask questions and seek answers:

► Is happiness looking for me in the wrong place?
► Shall I move to another city and rent a house under a false name?
► Shall I remove the exhaust pipe and drive around the neighborhood at night?
► Is my body a hotel?
► Are my lies a masterpiece of the avant-garde?

During the rehearsals we welcomed everything that was personal or hidden away. There were questions that made us laugh and others that made us cry. We posed questions that no one was able to answer and questions that concealed something other than the obvious. We watched the questions sing and dance, fall and rise. We shut each other's mouth when it came to questions that we could not stand to hear. We sat in silence and in the dark trying to retrieve those questions that spring up from nowhere just before we fall asleep. We let these questions tell their stories with music and humor.

The Bird of Pleasure (Exotic Pleasures) is a sci-fi story in Peter Carey’s collection of stories Fat Men in History.

"...she knew, before he arrived at the car, exactly what his eyes would look like. She had seen those eyes more and more recently, like doors to comfortable and familiar rooms that suddenly open to reveal lift wells full of broken cables..."

Our performance, using elements of magic realism and physical theatre, tries to observe what happens when a new element is introduced into society, and explore its consequences on ordinary people.

KVETCH is a black comedy - a study on the impact of stress on our lives, a study on the anxiety that keeps us awake at night. It is the demon who is thirsty for our blood and is ready to suck our self-confidence. We are surrounded by scores of problems that are not queuing to be solved, but at any given moment they are ready to jump the queue and to scream until they get our attention, regardless of whether what we have been up to has just been ruined. These kvetch are the neglected children that were born out of a faraway anxiety. We might want them to disappear, we might shout at them, confide them to our therapists, or we take pills to kill them at birth but, somehow, these always return in the end. How often is it that when we speak we engage in an inner conversation with ourselves, hoping to be guided or protected? Sometimes, however, this conversation, which takes place in the depths of our minds, is more real than our actual words. If only we could always put these hidden thoughts into words, our communication would be much more profound! We are like icebergs that float through life slowly and rarely, if ever, do they reveal what lies beneath.

Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing gained a reputation in the late 1960’s for his radical objection to conventional psychiatry. His early books The Divided Self and The Politics of Experience questioned the right of society to proclaim itself sane and others mad.

Protesting the “outrageous violence” inflicted on patients by drastic therapies like electric shock, he generated controversy with his willingness to try psychedelic drugs, meditation, and other unconventional techniques in search of a healing common ground between doctor and patient.

Apart from his purely scientific books Laing wrote three others, which belong to the field of literature. Do You Love Me? and Knots are a “conversation in dialogue and verse” (to quote Laing himself). They are a sequence of dialogues and poems that vividly depict the “knots” and impasses of human relationships.

The Facts of Life consists of diaries, memoirs, and thoughts, which reveal Laing’s conviction that disturbed personalities, are sane people who react irrationally to an environment of emotional instability, frigidity, and violence. Besides, Laing himself was an assaulted and battered, by his parents, child and that surely constitutes an omen for his later focusing on the interpersonal and social environ that people grow in.

Our show is based on these three books and constitutes an attempt to work our way into the wounded soul of a boy who is suffocating in his attempt to understand the absurd games his parents play. Games he inevitably resorts to, himself because he does not know any other way of “being” in a relationship.

This be the verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
by fools in old-style hats and coats,
who half the time were soppy-stern
and half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
and don't have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin 

I sat in the bar for a bit. Just one fellow in there. I said, "My hobby is people, what do you do?" Lo and behold he's on the film too, the animal handler, Kenny. In charge of the cat. I said, "That's interesting, Kenny. I didn't know there was going to be a cat. I love cats. I love dogs too, but I love cats." He said, "Would you care to see her? She's asleep on my bed." I said, "That's convenient." He said, "Lesly. Don't run away with that idea. I am wedded to my small charges."
Alan Bennett | Her big chance

And kindness starts at home. You can not beat your pets, and come quick at your wife, pretending that you forgot to take the garbage out and go be nice to whales. It is not right, it is transparent and it makes you look like a jackass too. Whales don’t deserve it. They’re fat and live in the ocean unlike your wife who’s fat and lives at home.
David Mamet | A sermon