Dressing rooms are spaces that are often inhabited to an extreme. Most of the time, they remain empty, submerged in an ordered and empty calm, waiting for their moment. Then, when inhabited—whether by actors, musicians, or lecturers—the spaces are filled with piles of foreign materials, a space of preparation and transformation, more or less disordered but full of elements, a workshop space used before and after the performance. It is the in-between space, a threshold that serves as an intermediary between fiction and non-fiction.
The actors prepare for the play, leaving behind personal objects that mark their identity as actors, they dress, they apply makeup, they prepare, and they become characters. They enter the world of fiction, a parallel narrative. Once the play ends, the reverse process happens: what was a character becomes an actor. The ghosts that lingered in the space, in the memory of the materials, dissipate. They return to where they belong.
The Earth is a Liquid Ball proposes an installation in the dressing room as a form of scenography. The dressing room will be inhabited as a fictional space or set, filled with elements such as papers, clothing, bags, items in use, which seem to be lost parts of a story we cannot fully access, like a crime scene we can slowly investigate. Like in a set design, these objects seem, at first glance, to be a realistic part of the daily life of the room. But as we delve into the narrative, focusing on details, we notice that something is amiss. Disparate elements that are not what they seem, that hide new narratives within the story, that maintain ghosts and memories, materialized in their pulsations.
