PERLE AI PORCI
TRILOGY
Berlin art week 2024-2026
My artistic practice investigates the body as a site of objectification, abjection and resistance. Through physical theatre, performance art and butoh I explore the dynamics through which bodies are desired, consumed, disciplined and rendered other, bringing hidden social and political narratives into physical and theatrical visibility.
This investigation has developed through my trilogy PERLE AI PORCI, three performances presented at Berlin Art Week between 2024 and 2026. In DELIKATESSEN, I explored the fragile boundary between love and violence through the ritual of a banquet, confronting the stigma and contradictions of desiring and being desired. CANDIES developed this inquiry through the tension between tenderness and destruction, while NATURA MORIENS expanded it towards the interconnected logics of possession, cultivation and control operating on bodies and environments. Across these works, I have developed a performance language that combines grotesque physicality, uncanny atmospheres, irony and the active involvement of the spectator. It asks how the body absorbs, performs, distorts and resists the images through which it is socially recognised.
NATURA MORIENS
Berlin Art Week 2024
Across history, bodies read as feminine have been depicted as carefully cultivated landscapes—to be admired and consumed through the objectifying gaze. NATURA MORIENS is a performance confronting the violence of a logic that cultivates, disciplines, and appropriates bodies and environments alike. Discourses around femininity and nature have been historically shaped through relations of possession and consumption. By rendering the body an unstable site of incorporation, leakage, and transformation, the performance brings this logic into tension with what remains unruly, excessive, and resistant to containment.
The Performance took place during the Berlin Art Week 2026 as part of my exhibition THERE IS A GARDEN IN HER FACE. The exhibition features a series of photographs created in collaboration with photographer Aleksander Brodowicz. Borrowing its title from Thomas Campion's seventeenth-century poem *There Is a Garden in Her Face*, this exhibition reclaims a phrase that once celebrated an idealized image of feminine beauty. The poem belongs to a long tradition of poetry that transformed women's bodies into living "nature mortae". The mouth embodies a profound paradox: is not only an object of aesthetic judgment but also an organ that speaks, bites, nourishes, and ages. It resists remaining merely decorative. Teeth are the only bones permanently exposed to the outside world. Their whiteness has long functioned as a symbol of youth, health, wealth, and desirability, while their inevitable decay exposes the fragility of life and the certainty of death. The exhibition reclaims Campion's title to expose the narrative implied in its central metaphor. A "garden" is nature brought under control: ideals of feminine beauty have been constructed, commodified, disciplined and domesticated. The exhibition therefore invites viewers to reconsider beauty as a site where patriarchal fantasies of control are ultimately unsettled by the body's irreducible wildness, vulnerability, and the visible architecture of our shared mortality.
Photographer: Sandro Mosco
CANDIES
Berlin Art Week 2025
Concept, choreography, performance: Carmen Lafran
Candies is a butoh dance theatre performance with a punk twist. Presented at the Berlin Art Week 2025 and as a site-specific version at Die Höhle Festival Modena, Candies is the second chapter of the trilogy "Perle ai Porci". After Delikatessen - premiered at Berlin Art Week 2024 - this new work delves further into the leitmotiv of unspoken truth, unforlding through both tenderness and destruction - an invitation for the audience to take part in the feast of what cannot remain hidden. In collaboration with drummer DCLXVI, it becomes a ritual of sweetness turning sour.
Duration: 40 minutes
CANDIES - trailer - Berlin Art Week 2025 | Live performance at Mahalla, Berlin 13.09.2026 | with live music byDCLXVI
CANDIES - Valentine´s Edition
Trailer and Live performance/site specific at Studio Acephale, Berlin 14.02.2026 Sound: Daniel Williams
DELIKATESSEN
Berlin Art Week 2024
Concept, Performance, Choreography Carmen Lafran
Live music Gabor Hatyani
“For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love”
Inspired by the words of Hélène Cixous, DELIKATESSEN is a performance about the tiny boundary between what we understand as love and the inevitable violence we inflict on one another. We are cut, dissected and served on a table of cheering glasses.
Delikatessen is an immersive performance conceived, choreographed, and performed by artist Carmen Lafran, blending butoh dance, physical theatre, and performance art. Audience interaction forms both the opening and closing rituals of the piece, inviting viewers into a transformative experience. The work has premiered at Berlin Art Week 2024 (venue: MaHalla Berlin) as a work in progress with improvised live music by Gabor Hatyani (cello).
The scene features a performance artist, a musician, and a table prepared for a banquet that will never happen.
