some of them might be hard to believe ~ by Mia Tamme
Mia Tamme's "some of them might be hard to believe" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 8, 2025 as one of 24 acts, (curated by Elisa Giuliani) at the occasion of the AEROPONIC ACTS 2025: CHOREIA (convened by Gabriëlle Schleijpen).
Here you will find an introduction by the presenter, video-documentation filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım and a written report by Grant Watson.The report includes a summary of the spoken, improvised comments by esteemed guest respondents Barby Asante, Sandi Hilal, and Zairong Xiang.
some of them might be hard to believe
Mia's question: How did I end up becoming you?
Mia's intro:
I have lived a long life. I have seen many things and some of them are hard to believe. When I stand in front of you with my bare voice, my limits expand. I enter a totally different "time zone" where I am not performing, but rather just telling you a story. I recall the countless times when I found myself sitting in a darkening space at dusk and listening to those older then me. You could never be sure if what they were saying was the truth. Did it really happen? Does that matter? The self became so thin and open that what you might call fiction started entering our facts. Of course, that's nothing new. As I said, I was raised on my granny's capriciously truthful stories. But I wonder... when did I end up becoming her?
Grant's report:
The artist stands on wooden platform without props apart from a stool. She wears a colourful woven textile and a sprig of flowers. She begins her monologue by saying that she would have liked to have made a spectacular presentation but instead she is going to do what she has been doing everyday around this time, which is to tell a story, a story that comes out differently. It concerns a series of stupid decisions she made that spring, while staying in a house on the border between Latvia and Estonia, with both her partner and her lover. Here she spends her days scraping the walls and pole dancing in the evenings, and as a result she has injured her wrist and is unable to write. She reflects on her writing and her notebooks, which she considers to be beautiful dyslexic artworks, containing all the jealousy and hatred she feels for her stepmother. Staying in the house she has needed to write to escape. She recalls her grandmother who never learnt to write properly. She asks: how do we process things without writing? How can they flow out from the body and become heard? How do we remember things when we can’t write them down? She recalls how her partner had read her a passage from a book which states that the border between inner and outer self becomes thicker at the time when people began to write. The artists sits, changes her subject position, inhabits a different voice, of someone who is old and has seen a lot. Now she speaks about a man who came to ask questions and who write writes down her answers. The man asks: what do you do? She replies that she grows potatoes, does craft, and sometimes she sings. He asks for a song and she gives him a song in Lithuanian. Shifting subject positions again, the artist asks: what will go down as our history in the archive? And - who is this ‘our?’
Barby Asante thanks Mia for inviting the mess in. The beautiful way that the artist is in the story but able to slip between time and characters. She notes that archives and museums tell us a particular kind of truth, how this performance question this truth, how truth is precarious and momentary. She is struck by the question of who tells the story, particularly at the end of someone’s life, and recalls Saidiya Hartman’s ‘Critical Fabulations’ in which stories emerge, where queer lives have been erased.
Zairong Xiang congratulates the artist for a wonderful work which demonstrates the power of language. That question of where the story is going is sustained to the end. He notes that from time to time there were very concrete images that hinted at an answer the question - how did I end up becoming you? This shared image might be a way to think through this question. He appreciats a twist in the work, a tension between the written and the oral, which was delivered in the form of a sharp feminist critique, that the works suggests something spicy about the archive.
Sandi Hilal wants to follow up on a point. It should not be taken for granted, that a work keeps you listening to the end, that it does not lose the audience for a minute. She loves that the story has been told several times and that it is always changing. She asks who has the right to narrate a story, because she sees a collectives breaking out of this one. She observes that someone will always be telling you (the museum for example) that it has to be a single story. This comes down to money and survival. And to have the ability to reject this, is to be free. It touches on authorship. To speak beyond the self is one of the hardest thing for people trained in the western academy where everything is about identity politics, and no one is let in because that would break the frame. She appreciates that the artist let the audience in.
