THE UNSPEAKABLE

Creation, performance and soundesign: Telmo Branco
Production Assistant: Tânia Guerreiro
Assistance in the creation and Photography: Rachael Mauney
Videography: José Freitas
Photo editing and video promo: Telmo Branco
In collaboration with: Acker Stadt Palast, Berlin; Hosek Contemporary, Berlin; Marameo e.V, Berlin; Teatro Papa-Léguas, Lisbon; Mala Voadora, Porto; Polo das Gaivotas, Lisboa.
With the support of: Goethe-Institut Lisboa.
The Performance in Berlin was funded by: DISTANZEN Solo | Dachverband Tanz Deutschland and NEUSTARTKULTUR.

Trigger warning

The content of this performance may be sensitive for people with experiences of sexual abuse, or similar trauma.

This performance does NOT recreate, literally describe, or graphically expose the violence inherent to the topic.

Concept 

When I was a child, my father raped me.
This performance is not about him. Nor about the act of rape.
When I was a child, my father sold my body.
He taught me that sexual violence is structural, has multiple agents, contexts and spaces, and feeds on silence, secrecy, shame, gender phobias, misogyny, religion, hunger, politics, tradition, habit, repetition, and forgetfulness.
This performance is not about my father. It is about the culture of those who came before and after him.

Father statue, today I take you down, you and those who came before and after you.
Father history. Father of many and total absence of Father. Patriarchy, today I denounce you, and in denouncing you, I take away your power, your influence, your protagonism. This performance is not about you. It is about rescuing my body, voice, self worth and sexuality, from your dominion.

"The Unspeakable" is an activist performance, which crosses the disciplines of theater, dance and sound, to sensitively confront structural sexual violence and the culture of silence.

Note of Intent:

"The Unspeakable" emerges from the need to destigmatize narratives of sexual abuse from a victimizing context, to one of empowerment.
While encouraging legal justice, "The Unspeakable" explores another kind of justice, also fundamental, which is to recover the sense of worth, purpose, and autonomy, shattered by the act of sexual assault.
"The Unspeakable" aims to remove sexual violence from the universe of the private, individual and isolated, in order to contextualize it within the cultural, social and political structures that enable and perpetuate it.
The goal of this activist performance, is to cultivate hope, generate awareness and encourage survivors of this type of violence to break the silence and/or feel less alone.

"The Unspeakable" emerges from a long and still ongoing therapeutic process, developed together with the Berlin Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Promotional pictures - The Unspeakable (Portuguese title: "O Indizível")