Kaleider’s It’s A Secret is a one-to-one (…to-one-to-one-to-one…) verbal storytelling project that only participants can experience.
The project premiers with 8 original stories being told to 41 people, who will then tell the story to 41 more, and so on. Only after participants have passed it on they will be able to know the historical journey of their story.
The stories only exist in each one of the participants and will become different in every passage, through shifting contexts, memory, language, imagination and time.
We are always tempted to know how the story has changed, what the “new” story is. But is this ever really possible? Do we ever hear the same thing as others? Is a common understanding what holds our social fabric together?
It’s A Secret plays with fiction and truth, secrecy and sharing, gifting and holding back, memory and invention. It invites us to consider the responsibility we have to tell each other stories. It invites us to think of the archive as a trace, not a monument. In a world where fake news proliferates at a much higher rate than truth, what do we choose to tell others?
In collaboration with Storytel, the stories will be the ones told in the podcast Tell Me Mama, nine portraits of Afro-descendant women, told by Afro-descendant women by Igiaba Scego and Esther Elisha.