Amaterski tihotapci / Contrabbandieri dilettanti

16 September 1947 a new border line –the line crossing the territory of Gorizia, or Gorica, dividing Italy and Yugoslavia– is marked on the ground. Wooden posts, long lines of white chalk, barbed wire. Images from the archive show two diverging points of view – two countries, two systems, two propagandas, dividing, confounding, but also igniting a desire. To cross that painful white line, new spaces are invented – secret ones where personal belongings are hidden as they are carried illegally across the border. They are for small pleasures. Those secret places are new spaces of belonging and longing – for which one will risk all for a fleeting moment of freedom.

Amateur Smugglers (2024) takes us across the confines of “the fourth wall” a moving performance of belonging to and longing for a community. Imbued with a genuine, raw, disarming wit and humour, Silvia Gribaudi & Andrea Rampazzo’s choreography is a negotiation and mediation between personal boundaries, stage convention and collective desire.

Adaptation of Dražen Dragojević’s text