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CONDOMINIUM is the title of a series of reenactments of performances, events and documental objects belonging to the history of Vou A Tua Casa, a performance art trilogy of theatre happenings enacted in domestic spaces premiered in 2003 by Rogério Nuno Costa. The series will be presented throughout 2024 and 2025 in a contextual relationship with the venues (galleries, stages, residency studios, etc.) and in collaboration with different guests in each iteration, as part of a broader retrospective project that marks, in a more critical than celebratory way, the 20 years since the premiere of Vou A Tua Casa and the educational, curatorial, academic and gastronomic sub-projects that followed. A diptych of experimental artist books will compile this body of work, joined by a set of conversations, laboratories, a podcast and a new live art piece planned to debut in 2025 at Teatro Nacional D. Maria II (Lisbon, Portugal). Parallel to this anthological work, CONDOMINIUM aims to further elaborate and intensify the conceptual relationships between a performance-as-encounter and the various agencies – artistic directors, producers, technicians, educators, spectators – that (co-)inhabit and/or visit a specific cultural institution or art space. While doing so, the series proposes the collective and collaborative writing of an epistolary narrative around the accidentality of an artist's erratic trajectory, delving into a 20-year old collection of private encounters and intimate one-to-one experiences, but moved to the public/indoors sphere: the stage (or the shared studio, the production's office, the white cube, etc.) as a place of both edification and disruption of the ideas of convention, history and hegemony. Inspired by the sensitive and poetic experience of dozens of personal and non-transferable encounters that took place over the years, CONDOMINIUM's ultimate objective is the consolidation of a community that, in a more or less wandering and serendipitous way, has converged around an itinerant work and its suggested geo-emotional path: “I went to your house, you came to mine and we met on the way; the time has come now for us to meet again on neutral territory and, while doing so, to question why we are here and what is left for us to say to each other. Do we still remember?” This cycle (and the retrospective project that anchors it) ambitions one or more answers to the inevitable question: can Vou A Tua Casa (and, ultimately, its creator) reconcile with the protocol space of the stage that it has refused two decades ago?

Rogério Nuno Costa * 2024

First in-progress presentation of CONDOMINIUM within the frame of Festival END - New Dramaturgy Encounters, organised by Colectivo 84 in partnership with Centro Cultural Vila Flor and Teatro Académico Gil Vicente (Portugal). The meeting-as-performance + dinner took place on the 20th March 2024 in Teatro Oficina (Guimarães, Portugal), featuring a double audience. At the table: Rogério Nuno Costa, the Festival's team and special guests: Mickaël de Oliveira, Beatriz Wellenkamp Carretas, Ana Mula, Nelson Guerreiro, Bruno dos Reis, Carlos Alves, Flora Miranda, Luís Araújo, Raquel S., Nuno Castro and Mafalda Banquart (guest artist).

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