Verona was the first stop of an activist trip in Italy during which we practiced spontanuous performance. Observation, conception, action: all in 24 hours for each performance.
We arrived on the 3rd of may 2008. A young italian told us then that two days before a young man got violently attacked by five fascists. He was then in coma.
At the same time there was in my head the echo of the song "Strange fruit" performed by Billie Holiday. This is a song about violence and lynching (in the context of those times with the Ku Klux Klan).
Verona is not used to performance. There are nearly only mimes. We had to deal with that and be temperate.
We were 3 young women from different origins for this performance: polish, french and italian. We declaimed "Strange fruit" sentence by sentence without singing it. I say one in english, Sarah translates it in french and Maria in italian then the microphone gets back to me for the next sentence and so on.
(On the last pictures you can see us performing in front of a "Mutuo sociale" graffiti. This is a fascist group.)
FRANCAIS
STRANGE FRUITS IN VERONA
Performance, Vérone, Italie. Mai 2008