KAKSIKIELINEN
(BILINGUE)
Rogério Nuno Costa * Recover Laboratory
2026
“This is the voice of my thoughts, a magic trick to test my existence. I'm going to introduce myself to the world. I’m going to identify myself. These are my thoughts speaking out loud. For someone to be able to hear me thinking, I have to say it. For someone to be able to read it, I have to write it. I am two languages: the one that I speak and the one that is being heard. I am two languages, I am bilingual, but I do not command either language, although I command them. I know the words, but my story escapes me every day, just like everything else. If I say "This is me", how many meanings does it have, this thing that I say? Infinite ones! It's an endless task. And yet, there is a meaning that overlaps again and again: "He and I", that’s what the others hear. Because my story must be the same as yours, which is the same as yours, which is the same as yours, and because all stories can always be summed up in one word: "story". Equality says that we are all a skeleton, that we are all an “I”. Equality is the great meaning, the vortex that attracts; equality is the great misunderstanding, so enormous it can even swallow the difference. And so I dedicate myself to this infinite task: to make meanings disappear! The reason I make them disappear, though, is not to reduce them more and more until I reach the true meaning, until I reach the truth of what I’m saying. It is not for making the two languages coincide or for determining the supposed "original language" that I erase meanings, no. I make meanings disappear so that I can find MORE meanings. Infinite ones. I erase meanings like I erase misunderstandings. And then I can look for the infinite difference. My language is not yours.”
José Maria Vieira Mendes
"Bilingue" (2015)
DIRECTION
Rogério Nuno Costa
CO-CREATION & PERFORMANCE
Aleksi Kinnunen, Miradonna Sirkka, Rogério Nuno Costa, Sofi Häkkinen
BASED ON A PLAY BY
José Maria Vieira Mendes
PRODUCTION
Recover Laboratory (FI)
RESIDENCY CO-PRODUCTION
O Espaço do Tempo (PT)
MOBILITY GRANT
Finnish Cultural Foundation (FI)
BILINGUE | KAKSIKIELINEN is an ongoing collaboration between Finland-based performance artist Rogério Nuno Costa and Finnish art collective Recover Laboratory, having at its base the play “Bilingue/Bilingual” by Portuguese author José Maria Vieira Mendes, which is to be used as a dramaturgical (both poetic and political) starting point, suggesting the building of a post-linguistic manifesto by means of performance and performativity. The text will be performed in both Portuguese and Finnish, revealing a dramaturgy based on operations of translation and retroversion. Bilingualism will serve here as a metaphor to Rogério Nuno Costa’s expat condition, an allegory about ‘understanding’ versus ‘not understanding’, the will to belong versus the feeling of not being fully accepted/understood. Whereas in its initial phase, this project ambitions the creation of a shared language that lays in-between two mother tongues, analysing bilingualism and incomprehension as a force capable of building a third (queer) linguistic space that confronts duality and binarism with the promise of a complex multiplicity – to understand each other through misunderstanding (each other), eventually turning that friction into a new form of communication, with its own grammar, playful humour and unavoidable strangeness. Sustained by gestures of subtitling and interpretation, imagination and invocation, the work aims to reveal the speeches (and their failures) emerging from the tensional space of the stage and the “talking bodies” that inhabit and find refuge in it. Language analysed here as exile and as condominium.