scent of a cloud

The lecture was held at Aurélien Gamboni's sculpture "Le Tiret" in Bernasconi Park, a bench in the shape of a dash. The sculpture is a publicly accessible platform that refers to Alice Rivaz – and to a metaphor that the writer particularly appreciated: the hyphen between the date of birth and date of death on our graves, which is supposed to summarise our entire life. The sculpture is linked to Gamboni's work on Alice Rivaz and serves as a platform for a series of events over several years dedicated to the author's concerns.

The bench stands in the park on a gentle slope under pine trees. The performance begins by inviting the audience to spread my wide costume out on the ground so that everyone can sit on it. The starting point is the scent of the pine trees under which we sit: with it, I draw a connection to Lakki on the island of Leros (Greece). I open the narrative with the same scent perception and let the audience follow my illegal exploration of an abandoned military barracks. The lecture becomes a linguistic navigation through the complex, politically charged and inhumane past of the place; the historical layers of use of the buildings are gradually clarified. The scent serves as a symbol of how thoughts, experiences and criticism – captured in eyewitness accounts – are carried like a cloud by the wind in all directions: boundlessly, across ruins and places of remembrance, into the present. This is how we are reached by the contents of the works of two contemporaries from different worlds, whom I discuss in the second act: Alice Rivaz (pioneer of feminist literature; motif of the "hyphen" as an interstitial space in life) and Elli Pappa (Greek author, resistance fighter, long-time political prisoner). Pappa, born in the same year as Rivaz, was arrested just as Rivaz published "La Paix des ruches" – because of her texts and her clear political stance. Her literary explorations of life in the space in between lead to a comparison with clouds. At the end, I cut my costume in two, stand up – and a cloud-shaped opening remains where I was sitting.