Chloë Lum, Yannick Desranleau

*2025 stock* In „The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum”, Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau feature a sung correspondence between an anonymous contemporary interlocutor and the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920–77), an important 20th-century literary figure. Epistolary “Dear Clarice” prose poems guide us through Rio de Janeiro, here covered with lush nature as if human activity had simply ceased. Played by four different performers (all sung by Sarah Albu), the protagonist addresses Lispector in the beyond; there’s no response but the whispers of orchids filtering through the urban jungle. In this materialist hymn, the performers interact with inanimate collaborators, objects that are somehow both strange and familiar.

Attending to the themes of language, nature, urban-ness, and illness (which the protagonist and the author have in common) the work probes the porous boundaries between humans and the material world. „The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum” explores the gestural, aural, and narrative potential of bodies and objects by highlighting the alienation experienced when the former become carapaces and the latter come to life. In this musical taking place between the worlds of the living and the dead, bodies and objects take on an inebriating sensuality, both tender and dark, like the stifling heat of a tropical city.