En–Knap, Silvia Gribaudi & Andrea Rampazzo: Amateur Smugglers

In Amateur Smugglers, we witness a moving performance about belonging to a community, being human and longing for it.

On 16 February 2025 at 17:00, the performance Amateur Smugglers will be staged at the Teatro Marcello Mascherini. The show will also be staged on 12 February 2025 at 20:00 at Španski Borci Culture Centre in Ljubljana and on 14 February 2025 at 21:00 at Teatro Comunale di Cormons.

The play draws on personal memories and historical testimonies of everyday acts of courage and ingenuity, small acts of rebellion in the form of smuggling everyday goods such as cigarettes, magazines or jeans.

16 September 1947 marked a new beginning. The day when the new border line on the territory of Gorizia, which divided Italy and Yugoslavia, was concretely marked on the ground. Wooden sentries, long lines of white chalk, barbed wire. Archival images reveal two different views – two countries, two systems, two propaganda narratives, dividing, confusing, but also wishful thinking. In order to cross this painful white line, people invent new spaces, secret places where they used to hide personal belongings that they illegally transport across the border. These are products linked to small pleasures. These secret places are new spaces of belonging and longing – the kind that risks everything for a fleeting moment of freedom.

Desire will set you free, or so the generations have imagined. The desire signified by denim, for example. This is the stuff dreams are made of. There is a defence of the role denim played in breaking down boundaries – and systems. No boundaries. It is a choice of freedom, not the freedom to choose, to go beyond, to go beyond or over borders, to migrate, to flee, to smuggle. The choreography, imbued with a genuine, raw, disarming wit – the signature and constant of Silvia Gribaudi and Andrea Rampazzo – is a negotiation and mediation between personal boundaries, stage convention and collective desire, through which a shared, communal body moves and is moved.

Photo: Sara Rman