This morning, Sergio had texted me to say that the lighting and spatial rehearsal for tomorrow’s performance will be at 10pm at Hamburger Banhof.
Around 8pm, Zorica and I took a Lime from Mitte towards the Hamburger Bahnhof because I wanted to see Sakamoto’s installation, which had just opened there the day before.
We arrived, but the queue was insane. It started all the way out on the street, stretched along the entire garden of the Hamburger Bahnhof, and then continued through the whole garden and interior space. A queue so long it made your bones fall off – even bigger than the one for Cattelan yesterday.
We walked all the way to the entrance doors and crossed the entire length of the queue, with people looking at us as if to say, “Where do these two think they’re going? Are they seriously trying to cut the line?”
Then, at the entrance, I said the magic password: KUBORAUM. Open Sesame.
The strict-looking security guy told me I could go in, but that I had to wait for Angelica.
and then, within a few minutes, Angelica appeared – like an angel descending from heaven. An older, so gentle woman in her seventies. The real boss. She simply winked at me with her left eye and said, “Follow me.” so Zorica and me followed her.
She led us through the entire Hamburger Bahnhof, passing all the people who had already been waiting for hours to get into Sakamoto’s installation. Within a few minutes, we had passed everyone and entered the kingdom of Sakamoto’s world.
There was a long corridor, with five or six separate rooms on the left. Each room contained a different Sakamoto piece, with some kind of audiovisual intervention or installation.
I called Sergio. He told me he was in the fourth room.
But when I got there, he wasn’t. So I stayed. And I became completely spellbound by what was happening inside that room. So spellbound that I didn’t want to leave.
I stayed there for a long time, completely absorbed, until I suddenly realized that time was passing and it was getting close to 10pm.
Eventually, I headed towards the exit – or rather, the entrance on the other side of the Hamburger Bahnhof, where visitors were standing there like coiled springs, waiting for security to let them in. And then I saw a nice familiar face from the night before. It was Andrea, whose surname I’ve forgotten, but I remember his energy and his work. He created an poetic intervention using old rope on the island of Filicudi.
We recognized each other because we had met the night before at Silencio club. We had talked about art and about how we knew each other. Actually, he doesn’t know me and my work, while, by some strange coincidence, I know his work but didn’t know him personally. Through our conversation at the Silencio, we had discovered that we have a mutual friend, Eleonora Barbareschi, who also spends her summers on Filicudi, where she has a family house.
That night, Andrea had taken a selfie of us at the club and sent it to Eleonora on WhatsApp. It was around 2 or 3am. After that, we said goodbye. He definitely stayed at the club until the end, I left because my bones were falling apart.
and today, through all the crowds, fog, noise and chaos of Berlin, we had somehow found ourselves standing in front of each other again. In the exact moment when I was leaving Sakamoto’s installation, because it was almost 10pm, the exact time when our lighting and spatial rehearsal with the Kuboraum crew for tomorrow’s performance was about to begin.
Then he told me that Eleonora had replied to our selfie, and I said, “ Wait, let me take a photo of you, so I can send it to her, just like you did yesterday, stereo effect ”
But because I was in a hurry and the queue behind us was impatient to get inside, we didn’t have time to take another selfie. So instead, I took a photo of him from a distance.
And as I was taking my phone out of my pocket, he ran his hand through his hair in a completely Italian way, fixing his hairstyle for the photo.
I said to him, “There’s no need to fix your hair. Don’t worry, you’re handsome either way.” He laughed, and I ran off to the rehearsal in the garden, where Sergio, Erica, Charlotte, Kiani, Mika and her mother were waiting for me.
Sergio, traditionally, loudly repeated three times:
“PAPI GUARDA!
PAPI GUARDA!
PAPI GUARDA!”
I met Charlotte and Mika’s mother, who immediately touched my heart because there was something so pure in her emanation. Human kindness and purity always touch me exactly where they need to – in the right place.
Then we waited for the technical crew to arrive.
The lighting technicians finally came – two lovely women whose names I have already forgotten. I think one of them was called Teresa, if I remember correctly. The other was the light designer, whose name I definitely don’t remember.
Everything was moving very slowly, while the night was falling and becoming colder and colder. At one point, after so much waiting, Sergio picked up a broom and started sweeping the steps of the Hamburger Bahnhof. For me, this was a scene of epic proportions.
Then I received a message from Mimi and Boya, who were coming from the restaurant towards the Hamburger Bahnhof.
Since the Germans are extremely strict and protocol-oriented, security wouldn’t let them in. I told them to say the magic word: “KUBORAUM.” And that’s exactly what they did.
At the entrance, they convinced security that they were part of the Kuboraum crew – perhaps the light designers who were running late. At first, I thought they wanted to see Sakamoto, not me. But they had actually come to see me and the rehearsal for tomorrow. Which they didn’t end up seeing anyway, because everything took so long that the lighting rehearsal didn’t start until 11:40PM.
We took two selfies, one inside the Bahnhof and one outside – a blue selfie with half of Mimi’s face in it. Boya also took a beautiful photo of the sky, which she later sent to me.
Then Boya and Mimi went back to the hotel, while we stayed behind waiting for the light designers.
It was getting colder and colder.
Eventually, we all went together into the exhibition space of the Hamburger Bahnhof, where there were wide benches for sitting and lying down.
Since my performance is also performed in a horizontal position, I immediately stretched myself out along the entire length of one of the benches. Later, Mika’s mother joined me, then Sergio and Mika. Somehow, we all ended up fitting onto the same bench. It became such a touching moment. Almost like a family portrait, all of us curled up together on one bench.
Kiani Del Valle was sitting on the floor, on the bare tiles, wearing a very thin costume that was barely thicker than tracing paper. I was honestly congrats of her reproductive organs.
Then Charlotte and Erica brought us a package from Uber Eats, filled with refreshing drinks, and, of course, coconut water. While I was lying there, Sergio opened the coconut water for me and handed it to me so I didn’t have to get up. I drank it lying down. What treatment. Like Madonna or little baby haha.
Eventually, from sheer exhaustion and all the waiting, we all collapsed into a kind of collective fatigue. And then, at one point, I started singing “Dođi, dušo, da te vidim” a cappella. For a moment, everything became completely silent.
We could hear only the echo of my voice travelling through the entire Hamburger Bahnhof, which has an incredible acoustic – almost like a church.
Then Sergio suddenly declared:
“VOGLIO MAMA!” and we all started laughing.
That was when Sergio told me, for the first time, that when he first heard the Japanese lullaby, tears had simply started running down his face. He said it had touched him so deeply that he listened to it on repeat maybe twenty times.
Then I told him the story of how that Japanese lullaby had reached me.I had exactly the same reaction when I first heard it.
It was during COVID, when we were having Zoom yoga gatherings. My friend Janaki, who is Italian, had lived in Japan for ten years, and somewhere along the way she had picked up this lullaby. One day, during our Zoom yoga meeting, she sang it to us.
And I immediately started crying. I don’t even know why. The tears just started running down my face. When the Zoom meeting ended, I wrote to her on WhatsApp and asked her to send me the recording and tell me what she had sung.
She sent me her a cappella recording, together with the lyrics. From that day on, for the next ten days, I listened to that lullaby endlessly. And I cried.
Tomorrow, I will perform it at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Lying down, but not crying. My tear glands have already dried out because of this lullaby.
But I will leave enough space for someone else to have their wet experience.