fugitive storyteller,  peforming the ‘unself’,

This project develops a performative practice that re-enacts the instability of language through the creation and performance of a trance language. Rather than treating language as a transparent vehicle for meaning, the work approaches it as a living organism—fragile, excessive, haunted, and constantly in transformation. Spoken word is used as the primary source, which is then transcribed onto the page and translated back into a score for performance. Through this recursive process, meaning slips, fractures, and multiplies, and the speaking “I” dissolves into a constellation of voices. At the center of the project is Develina, a fugitive storyteller and trance-performer performing the “unself.” Develina operates at the threshold of writing, ritual, and comedy-horror. Their performances do not represent identity but actively destabilize it. Language is broken, repeated, mispronounced, screamed, whispered, and translated across tongues until it collapses into echo, monster, ancestor, inner child, and joke. Fear is not avoided but reworked into curiosity; horror is allowed to turn into laughter. The project frames performance as an unstable ceremony in which text becomes score, the body becomes an instrument, and the performer functions as a medium rather than an author. By channeling contradictory and spiraling voices, the work opens a haunted yet playful space where language loses authority and becomes collective, porous, and possessed. The project asks how language can be inhabited rather than mastered, and how identity can be performed as something fugitive, multiple, and continuously becoming.











DEVELINA

Develina moves as if her body is a question.

Too high, too thin,
Her heels force her to sway,
pausing, to catch herself mid-step.

Her hair drags behind her, pooling on the floor, knotting around objects,  

Her nails tap against each other when she gestures,
clicking out an unreadable rhythm, a language she once knew but can’t fully remember.

She sings, or tries to. The words come out tangled, slipping between memory and forgetting.
Half-lyrics hover on her tongue, dissolving
before, the land.

She repeats them, uncertain
was it this word? This note? Her voice stretches, stumbles, falls into silence.

She listens to the gaps as if they hold meaning.

There is something excessive about her

too much hair, too much height, too much reaching

but also something fragile, like
she might collapse under the weight of her own extensions.

The audience, if there is one, watches without knowing whether to lean in or look away.
They wait for resolution, but
Develina is not interested in finishing.

She lingers in the almost, in the slip, in the in-between.



D’s hair

D’s hair’s impossibly long.

A mass drags her
behind, something she can’t
escape, reminds her of her
weight,    and the space she occupies. 

The strands fall in cascades,
tangled and knotted, curling around,
objects, weaving into
things, falling as she, fails

Language.











Everything is
as if

Memories

unwilling to be
left    behind,

unwilling to be
fully    let go


S is always bound
encircled by the things
S carries

H is a  separate entity,
It pools on the floor,
sprawling out like
a liquid thought, an overgrown thing
that holds her to the place
S could really leave.

haunting beauty in this excess. The length, the untamed wildness of it—like a song she once knew but can’t quite recall—reminds us that sometimes, we are defined by the things that seem to weigh us down.

Her hair is not simply a passive thing. It has agency, much like her body—each strand a reflection of her own instability. It wraps around her as she moves, each step an attempt to break free, but it refuses to release its grip.

When S turns, it shifts with,
an overgrown T constantly being reformed, like a story that never quite concludes.

second skin




The house / B.’95

Some of my earliest memories are linked to the first house, which was not my first house, but the second. I was getting used to the presence of my father, who’d been absent for the very first years of my life. I used to call all my uncles ‘bab’. My cousins, almost as in a rhyme, used to call their auntie ‘mam’. Family relationships were already unstable, roles were mixed and improvised, Belonging followed an inverted relational logic.

The house had three rooms I remember, and a bathroom, I don’t.
The three rooms had intersecting functions, depending on our needs. Sometimes the kitchen would be a living room, the living room a bedroom, the bedroom, a bedroom.

That’s where I learned that migration was loving people in rooms that kept changing shape.

I remember my mum always cooking for more than us only. She would wear black tight elastic leggings, Superga shoes, floaty silky shirts. Her curly dark hair, tight in a ponytail. She was more beautiful than I could ever tell her.


La casa / B.’95

Alcuni dei miei primi ricordi sono legati alla prima casa, che non era la mia prima casa, ma la seconda. Mi stavo abituando alla presenza di mio padre, assente nei primissimi anni della mia vita.

Chiamavo tutti i miei zii “papà”. I miei cugini, quasi come in una rima, chiamavano la loro zia “mamma”. I legami della nostra famiglia erano già instabili, i ruoli mescolati e improvvisati. L’appartenenza seguiva una logica relazionale invertita.

Anche la casa funzionava così.

La casa aveva tre stanze che ricordo, e un bagno che non ricordo.
Le tre stanze avevano funzioni che si intersecavano, a seconda dei nostri bisogni. A volte la cucina diventava un soggiorno, il soggiorno una camera da letto, la camera da letto, una camera da letto.

Ricordo mia madre che cucinava sempre per più persone di quante noi, in realtà, fossimo. Indossava leggings neri attillati ed elastici, scarpe Superga, camicie di seta, leggere, leggere. I suoi capelli ricci e scuri, stretti. In una coda.

È sempre stata più bella di quanto avrei mai potuto dirle.

Mislanguage / Memory

I think I
trust memory more
than language, and
that’s why
language-dream
works.


I think I 
lose things 
when I try
to name them



I think I 
learned to speak 
in a language 
that wasn’t mine 
so I could learn 
to say that no 
language 
could be 
my,

no

Learning from GERTRUDE STEIN

In Stein’s work , nouns stop behaving like nouns.
“I,” “she,” “a woman,” “a thing”  become sounds with habits, not references. The word stops pointing. It starts performing itself. Repetition doesn’t say who the self is, but that the self cannot stay singular. Each time i repeat a word, it forgets its previous use, it becomes, slightly foreign and freighting.

references:

hair

• https://longhairoverface.blogspot.com/2020/12/long-hair-brushing-over-face-by.html


• https://longhairoverface.blogspot.com/2014/05/indian-long-thick-hair-women.html