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?

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.

(in German)

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Participating artists

Lucien Strauch

Jules Head

Emilia Bongilaj

Svenja Kosmalski

Tom Foskett-Barnes

Robert Matysiak

Von Carmen Maria Machado (Autor/in)

Amelie Willberg