Funny Papers
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Funny Papers *
Funny Papers
Conceived by Lexi Fleurs
with the help of Lili Marto
Commissioned by the Wiesbaden Staatstheater for the Wiesbaden Biennale 2022
Funny Papers stages a wedding between two women, and through them between two Europes that the continent's official narrative insists are part of the same project. On one side, Bulgaria: turbofolk, fake gold chains, rakia, the aesthetics of excess. On the other, Swiss Protestant minimalism — restraint as moral position, reticence as taste. The marriage is consummated as farce, and the farce is the argument.
The performance recreates the sonic architecture of a cheap Balkan wedding: a DJ shouting over a microphone in the middle of an Oriental melody, the register of a Black Sea coast restaurant where volume substitutes for ceremony. One of Bulgaria's best-known pop singers performs from within the audience, collapsing the distance between stage and banquet table that Western institutional space is built to maintain. Nothing is framed for the visitor's comfortable observation; the audience is seated inside the event rather than positioned before it.
What emerges is conceptual dissonance made audible — the friction produced when two culturally incompatible systems are forced into the same room and asked to celebrate. The work treats nationality itself as funny papers: documentation, comic strip, and something not entirely serious, a set of credentials that determines how a body is read at a border and how its culture is filed within the European imaginary.
The piece refuses the terms on which Eastern European culture is usually admitted to Western institutions — as periphery to be explained, kitsch to be fetishised, or authenticity to be extracted. Presented inside a German state theatre, Funny Papers declines that transaction. It dismantles the hierarchy of high and low by taking the low entirely at its word, and finds in the wedding — a ritual of unity — the most efficient instrument for exposing that unity's fictions.
trailer
