Ghosts and phantoms are ostensibly able to traverse time and space, cross through impenetrable walls and step into other dimensions. Firmly planted beyond the boundaries of logic and rationality, Nicholas Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak, have been possessed over and over by various entities who tell intertwined stories of exclusion and injustice. Some of the themes addressed are sweeping in nature, stemming from global history and contemporary political events; or geographically localised around the particular narratives of Filipino myths, or Slavic folk tales. These sources uncover the content boiling in the universal unconsciousness and creating the very foundation of our cultures, based as they are on violence against the other.

Rooms, a thirty-minute scripted performance in which Grafia and Sobczak underline the artificiality and theatricality of their actions, is conceived as the ‘personification of phantoms of past events inhabiting the performers bodies’. In their performance, personal accounts are no longer confined to history but rather seen as an evolving narrative. Conceived with an intentional focus on minority communities, Rooms shows us the great gaps in history – episodes historians might have missed and those that have been purposefully ignored. It also underlines the subjective nature of memory – which is often steered by dreams, irrationality, emotions and ideologies.