Digging a Glittery Grave is a 3-hr open-door performance installation, where mourning
rituals are enacted by continuously (re)building the stage with materials and objects
connoted with an aesthetic of cuteness.
The performers want to invite the audience for an honest and sensitive encounter; a
space that allows people to enter an intimate world where both grief and laughter have
space. To give cuteness depth and make heavy topics manageable by putting them in
a cute context.
Digging a Glittery Grave started as a desire to contextualize the performer’s friendship
by creating a space for memory, intimacy, and shared life. They carry many similar life
stories living as trans-masculine people. In the few existing portraits in pop culture,
trans people are still often reduced to something comical, cute, tragic, almost
inhumane, already dead, where there is little to no agency in the storytelling. Instead,
the performers want to create a space where trans people exist as multifaceted
individuals with all the strengths, weaknesses, sorrows, and joy it entails.
The audience is invited to use the crayons, draw on cute images, move the chairs, sit
where they please, walk around in space and walk in and out of the installation. They
are further invited to take active part by using face-filters on Instagram and live-transmit
cute pictures/videos of the performers and their cute universe.
The online version of Digging a Glittery Grave is shown from both the performer's and
the audience's point of view on a customized online platform created by Alix Smed
Dawids.
Use your Instagram, make a story and tag @diggingaglitterygrave to get your story on
this website.
With this performance, we mourn what never was or did not have room to be.
With support from