VENUES TO BE CONFIRMED

They live in tiny rooms, tucked away on the outskirts of the city, rented out at high prices. They find themselves in a kind of limbo – a grey zone between here and there, between distance and belonging, between ambition and solitude…
The visual artist and theatre maker Thomas Verstraeten – a founding member of the FC Bergman collective – collaborates with a group of international students to explore what it means to leave one’s home and belongings behind and try to settle in a city miles away from home.
Verstraeten takes the audience on a journey through a series of student accommodations scattered throughout the city of Milan, creating portraits that are just as intimate portraits. Using the students’ daily lives as his cue, he creates a series of theatrical miniatures. The theatricalisation of reality here is not a case of inventing fiction, but rather of idealising space and time.
The City of Arrival is a reflection on identity and migration – the latter seen not as movement from one place to another, but as a continuous state of transition. Identity, in turn, is not a fixed construct, but rather a constantly shifting tension between multiple existances.

Multilingual performance