Why have I launched this page to showcase my new work? Well, it all started when…

sometime during the first lockdown, in 2020, I needed to make some sense of the world: Covid, lockdowns, isolation, BLM protests, women’s rights protests… it was all getting too much and so I put pen to paper, as I always do when I need to express myself to make sense of senseless things. Then a year later, the extraordinarily talented performance artist Marisa Garreffa put on a special show at Florence’s British Institute, called To Remember To Listen. For seven days a week, she read submissions that detailed people’s stories of the pandemic, and as she read, she sewed together these stories, physically stitching together our experiences to make a record of how we confronted that particular moment in time. A remarkable act of generosity on Marisa’s part as she gave her time, her voice, her heart and her body over to channeling all our experiences, embodying them so that we could ALL heal (you can find out more about the project here).

I submitted a piece of writing I had shown to no one, a work I had created just to assuage my burning tumultuous heart. I visited Marisa on the first day of the project, standing on the street to watch her perform through a glass vitrine, and as I stood there she started to read my words – it took me a moment to realise they were mine. And as I watched her perform my piece, and was so moved by her performance, what her own artistry brought to my words, a new world of writing and performance and collaboration opened up to me. I really hope to create more spoken word pieces in the future and to continue to work with Marisa and other talented multi-disciplinary artists to create pieces that help us all digest and protest and make sense of all that we are confronting as humans in this moment in our world history.

I decided to create this page on my website to showcase such work. Please enjoy Marisa’s performance in both video and audio below, and visit her website to find out more about her. And if you wish to donate something to the British Institute in Florence to support such important creative community work, click here.

I CAN’T BREATHE by Kamin Mohammadi

performed by Marisa Garreffa