Ferengi is a series of costumes that walk through the environment as living sculptures. They can be exhibited as sculptures and I move them in performances. Last year I made a dance performance with the same name and with the costumes, which played at De Parade. Due to the many projects I did while traveling or living abroad, I was given many names along the way: I was a Mono, a Toubab or a Mzungu.

I started thinking about how it was possible that I was completely new somewhere, but there was already a name for me, and a story in which I played. I started asking myself “What is that story, and how can I represent it?”

I decided to find out what it meant to be a total stranger. In Ethiopia, where I was working at the time, I had become a ferengi (stranger). In collaboration with the National Theater and Guramayne Art Center, I made an all-covering costume to detach myself from any recognizable context, from any known story that was already attached to my body.

Nothing of me could be brought back to what I, who was inside, was.

I walked in this costume from Guramayne to the National Theater with an Ethiopian friend and filmmaker (Yero Adugna Eticha) who filmed it while he easedropped the people, to see what stories would emerge. The result was as simple as it was astonishing.

People began to reveal themselves and show their own identities.

Someone wondered if it was a forgotten Ethiopian tradition and another made the sign of the cross to ward off evil. A woman calculated how much banana bread she could make from the suit, and someone else thought it was a walking house. The audience became the performer and played a scene and I became their audience.

My costumes are not clothes. They have to do with the transition between yourself and the environment. And with the question of how much of your environment becomes a part of you, and what part of you is determined by the environment. What choices you make in this dynamic and how you ‘surf’ it.

After a few years of doing performances with my ‘strangers’ I have realized that identities are changeable and that they are located in an imaginary geography in a symbolic time and space. And that we should perhaps consider them as fiction.

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