FEARFANFIC is a romance, between fear and desire.
i can't do this in my own body - i will become something else.
the transformative power of fiction, or should i say reality?
my worst case scenario becomes my biggest fantasy.
in this world i control my fears, i control my break up, i control my death, i make it the start of something else, something that is still yet to come, it exists only as a possibility right now.
i'm a wasp. i exist in a story by Megan Milks called Earl and Ed, i'm Earl, but i'm not. I now turned Earl into me, we exist in paralell. i have a partner, she's called pérola, she's an orchid.
in this piece, you will hear me talking to a close friend, you don't need to know who she is.
created and performed by Leonor Lopes
voises by Leonor Lopes and Leonor Mendes
sound by Pedro Costa
mentorship by João Fiadeiro, Carolina Campo, Daniel Pizzamiglio
artistic and technical support by Leticia Skrycky, Santiago Tricot
thank you to the entire pacap 5 group <3
performed in TBA - Teatro do Bairro Alto, Lisboa 2022
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fearfanfic is a project in which I propose to create or adapt fictions about fears, both mine and others'. The intention is to explore fear until it becomes pleasurable, until it creates an emotional mirror, or a transfer of subjectivities between us and our fears. To let ourselves sink into the startle and stay there, in that grey area, where we cannot hide because there is no boundary between our body and our hiding place.
In the first draft of this project, presented in the foyer of the TBA (2022) - together with José Capela's installation - , I started from a story by the writer Megan Milks: Earl and Ed. This tale is about a relationship between a wasp and an orchid and addresses themes such as the typology of relationships (monogamy and non-monogamy) between pollinating insects in order to translate fears of modern everyday life into an interspecies relationship. I adapted this story into a conversation, between two voices, one of them being the wasp, and the other a friend of the wasp that is never identified. In this conversation, which is abruptly interrupted by different sounds and music, several themes present in the original story are approached, as well as others that I added in the logic of creating a fanfic. The conversation goes through the fragility of life, which can be, in the case of the character speaking, threatened by a small drop of rain; the fear of starting a new life - when abandoning the hornet's nest in search of a new life format -; the fear of abandonment that the orchid feels for not being able to accompany the flights of its partner and many other things. This audio is accompanied by a video of a forest whose rhythm changes between very fast, as if it were the look of someone running, or long pauses in flowers, leaves or in a porcelain doll of a wasp. The projection of this video was made on a yellow puff hanging from the ceiling. Underneath this puff there was another one where, at the same time as these two elements (sound and video), the performer is performing a series of actions as she slowly leaves the puff. The performative actions are always between purging (taking black latex from the mouth or taking off gloves and letting a viscous liquid drip from the hands) and hiding (starting to take off a dress that never ends, being the end of this performance a pile of fabrics, from which other materials come out, and between which the position of the performer's body is no longer clear).