Gessnerallee
Zürich

What if my parents hadn’t moved from Croatia to Switzerland in 1989?

What if my grandfather had been in the same house as his mother in 1944 around lunchtime? What if I had sent that one specific love letter? What if I had been born a boy?

Four women discuss the breaks, the omissions and the «what ifs» of biographies. As they do so, they trawl through recent pasts: those of their mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, as well as those of the different nations from which they themselves come. They explore the fiction of linearity, search for points that could have been a turning but were not; they look for possible versions of the past, for gaps in the process, for missed opportunities. They confront a superfluity of biography, excess and the simultaneity of events that resist any form of reduction.

Žic, Schütz, Ulbricht & Brunner are Ivna Žic, Marie Ulbricht, Katja Brunner und Amadea Schütz. Coming originally from different theatrical and performance areas, they are working together on a project and in this constellation for the first time. They are supported by the stage designer Martina Mahlknecht, costume designer Sophie Reble and the Israeli musician Daniel Sapir.