Winner of the Grand Prix de littérature dramatique in 2011 and 2019, Au bord by acclaimed French playwright Claudine Galea is directed by Valentino Villa and interpreted by award winning Italian actress Monica Piseddu.

The performance centers around a photograph: a woman wearing a uniform is holding a man on a leash. The picture was taken in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and was published in the Washington Post on May 21, 2004, the image, a terrible document of an unspeakable act of violence and horror, one that defies representation. But it is on the woman in the photograph that the author focuses her attention. Starting from her unconfessable feelings of attraction for this woman and her obscenity, a series of female figures arise in the narrator’s body and head, in which the woman soldier depicted in the photograph conflates dangerously with that of the lover – who abandoned Galea – and that of a mother who abused her. The photograph becomes a palimpsest of the inexpressible, a dramatic object divested of its documentary and political meaning. An act of subversion, perhaps, one that contributes to the primal and unsettling experience conveyed in the text.
Au bord asks questions about the nature of images and how they are related to the psyche and thought. How do these visual documents concern us? How do they find their way into our unconscious?