l Margine is an evolving story about mental health.
It is a story because Kelly Ardens, its chaotic storyteller, draws on her own experiences and her life as a person with borderline personality disorder. It is a work in progress because it feeds on emotions and contradictions and poses questions which, perhaps, have no answer but which continue to hang in the air – sometimes light and fleeting, sometimes as heavy as a boulder.

Il Margine is the protagonist’s world and a new narrative for people who experience not a ‘disorder’ or ‘suffering’, but the condition of being neurodivergent. That world belonging to ‘crazy’ people, so far removed from what is considered ‘normal’.

The audience will be invited to watch and listen, immersing themselves in the performer’s everyday life: in her epic acts of pain, in the small and large gestures that make her feel at ease, and in her multifaceted art, ranging from tarot cards, coloured pastels, cigarettes and false eyelashes to whatever lies hidden in her Hello Kitty bag.

By dedicating her favourite songs, reciting passages from the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’, and laying herself bare by sharing the truths of her spiritual journey, Kelly envisions Il Margine as a work in progress, where anything is still possible.

Or as Bell Hooks would say: ‘A place capable of offering us the possibility of a radical perspective from which to look, to imagine alternatives and new worlds […] A space of resistance. A space I have chosen.’