Sitting around a large table, several performers engage in the ongoing process of re-writing The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. The goal is to make a new co-authored version of the book, to make it their own, to make it more a part of our current world, to take Pessoa’s deep melancholy and transform it into something somehow a little happier or at least energize the text with a certain charge of the present moment.

Fernando Pessoa wrote under a series of heteronyms, of different identities, each with their own distinct backstory and literary style. He wrote in Portuguese, English and to a lesser degree in French. The Book of Disquiet, an assemblage of texts that Pessoa left behind, was published posthumously, and to this day there is an ongoing discussion as to how the material within the book should be organized, what version might be considered final.

Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie is a way of turning this highly debated book into a new one, to see how far it will stretch. It is a tribute to the imaginative possibilities of reading as re-writing, how we each have our own version of the books we read, how we mix them with our lives and with the world around us. By making this analogy literal, by performatively enacting this metaphor, we hope to create a space for an ongoing conversation between coincidence, insight and nuance.

This installation/performance occupies all five spaces of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery.