Which stories end up in the archives, and which do people prefer to forget? How do we deal with the painful chapters of our own life story? With the episodes we'd rather keep buried deep in a box, even though we wouldn't be who we are today without them?
Image gallery
Grafik WORX "Archiv der Träume"
In her memoir, "The Archive of Dreams," Carmen Maria Machado has found an answer to this question: She tells the story of Carmen, a literature student who reclaims control over the interpretation of her relationship with the charismatic, unpredictable "woman in the dream house," a relationship marked by violence and manipulation.
Machado playfully shifts between genres, repeatedly reconstructing the dream house of her memory—as a love story, a confession, a spy thriller, or a self-help guide—only to tear it down again immediately.
She dismantles the cliché of the lesbian love story as a perfect utopia:
"I am recording in the archives that domestic violence between partners with the same gender identity is possible and not uncommon. I am throwing the stone of my story into a vast chasm and determining the extent of the emptiness based on the soft impact."
Author Leo Lorena Wyss (winner of, among other awards, the Nestroy Prize for Best Emerging Talent) has dramatized Machado's text for the Berliner Ensemble. Jules Head from Bristol embarks on a playful exploration of a stage language for the psychological mechanisms of traumatic experiences.
Additional information
In the dream(a)house "Who knows about us? In the past, that could have meant a lot. Who knows that we are together? Who knows that we love each other? Who knows that we are queer? But now: Who knows that I yell at you like this?" When Carmen Maria Machado's "The Archive of Dreams" was published in the US in 2019, it struck a nerve. Never before had violence in lesbian relationships been addressed in a literary work in such a comprehensive, unsparing, and formally ambitious way. Machado breaks with a taboo that had long held that the lesbian community was under such attack from outside that it had to maintain the image of an ideal relationship world within the community. We can't afford bad PR. Machado chooses the memoir genre. The story she tells is based on her own real life; her protagonist is named Carmen, like herself. Carmen is in her early twenties, studying creative writing in Iowa City, and falls head over heels in love with another young writer, whom Machado refers to only as "the woman from the dream house." The obstacle that her lover is already taken is quickly removed. She proposes a love triangle. Her girlfriend, Val, is open to the idea. But the polyamorous love story soon begins to crack, and Carmen finds herself in a prison of psychological and physical violence, manipulation, and dependence, from which she will only find a way out years later. Having escaped with her life and a trauma, now happily married to Val (the woman who was also part of the love triangle at the beginning), she asks herself: What happened to me? Why couldn't I escape this relationship for so long? What does it take for me to overcome what happened? And what does it take for others to believe me? This is where Jules Head's production comes in: Carmen and Val embark on a reenactment journey through Carmen's past in the workshop, with Val repeatedly slipping into the role of the perpetrator. "Memory is a form of architecture," wrote artist Louise Bourgeois. In "Archive of Dreams," Carmen and Val become architects of a dream (a) house and archivists of an unfinished chapter of queer history. By Lucien Strauch
Participating artists
Von Carmen Maria Machado (Autor/in)
Amelie Willberg
Lucien Strauch
Jules Head
Emilia Bongilaj
Svenja Kosmalski
Tom Foskett-Barnes
Robert Matysiak
Dates
April 2026
| Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa | Su |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
| ||
6
|
7
|
8
|
9
|
10
|
11
|
12
|
13
|
14
|
15
|
16
|
17
|
18
|
19
|
20
|
21
|
22
|
23
|
24
|
25
|
26
|
27
|
28
|
29
|
30
|
