Tai Shani creates a large-scale immersive installation that also functions as a site for performance. The work is an experimental adaptation of Christine de Pizan’s 1405 proto-feminist text The Book of the City of Ladies.

Twelve performers play characters, including The Neanderthal Hermaphrodite, The Medieval Mystic, The Vampyre, Phantasmagoregasm, and Paradise to create a 12 part performance series, depicting an allegorical city of women, a space to imagine an alternative history which privileges, sensation, experience and interiority, undermining patriarchal conceptions of narrative history to propose a possible post-patriarchal future.

The performances took place on the opening three days of the festival, with the sequences filmed and the documentation subsequently presented alongside the installation. Each episode focuses on one of the characters and is delivered through prose monologues which are violent, erotic and filled with fantastical images that re-imagine a world complete with interlinked cosmologies, myth and histories. Drawing on multiple reference points including feminist science fiction, post-modern architecture, and feminist and queer theory, this is Shani’s most ambitious and multi-layered work to date and includes an original score by ‘Let’s Eat Grandma’.