About

Instructions for use:

Each visitor is welcomed into the Kabinett with the artist for a 5-7 minute session, after which they will be asked to fill out a questionnaire regarding the performance.

The time spent will be focused on contact and conversation, and it will foster an experience of reciprocal trust in sharing the space together.

Chiara Mu is interested in conveying stories that, although published in some of the most widely read national newspapers, still remain deeply untold. Especially now, as we find ourselves globally overwhelmed by conflicts.

And yet, specifically for this reason, these stories need to be told as much as they seem destined to disappear, like many other micro-stories of common people in many different parts of the world that seem simply washed off the earth by wars, natural disasters, economic crisis and, more recently, pandemic diseases.

This performance is inspired by an article written by the Iraqi Journalist Mona Mahmood in 2018 regarding the city of Mosul. Divided by a river and occupied in 2015 by ISIS on the right bank (the centuries-old part), the city was freed by the Iraqi Army in 2018, at that point drastically reduced to ruins.

The inhabitants that were forced out by Isis went back to non-existent homes, harassed and treated as collaborationists by the national police. These inhabitants were confronted with the reality of their painful context: houses reduced to rubble, small sleeping cells of the militiamen still present around, very high costs of reconstruction, and the shadows of former relatives no longer alive that seem to manifest themselves everywhere.

This performance is also part of a PhD research project in Performance Art (Roma Tre University in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Art of Rome) and the collected questionnaires will be useful for anonymous data collection to support the practice aspect of the artist’s research.

Bringing toys to graves, speaking to empty rooms, treating ghosts like real people.