Costumes are tools. They are resources to resist, to protect, and to unearth unseen narratives. The relationship to our bodies—how we labor with them, what is worn, how time is spent—is a cyclical and poetic process.

“Poetry is not a luxury it is a vital necessity towards survival and dreams (...) Poetry gives name to the nameless.”
—Audre Lorde

As experimental performers in collaboration, Rome would allocate time for us to make new agreements, research generative working language, orient our labor, and dance while building our archive. Repertory Closet will excavate European colonial roots, turning the tables via choreographic problem solving, sorting, and reusing materials across spaces in Rome. We choose the Sable Venus as a central research theme, inspired by an ongoing collaboration between Jasmine Hearn and Jennifer Nagle Myers with Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus. Exploring the city this way, we will ask each other, how to decolonize a closet?