Museum of Lungs

Museum of Lungs by performer and writer Stacy Hardy and director Laila Soliman is a play about pain, trauma, and illness as they relate to capitalism, vulnerability, sociality and history. Informed by Hardy’s experience of living with tuberculosis – the years before the diagnosis, her isolation and the lengthy and difficult treatment regime – it draws on archive material from around the world. What you discover is a story about the individual body and of collective care in the midst of systems plagued by colonial and systemic racial violence. It questions personal culpability and asks if vulnerability and disease might initiate a resistance to power structures that operate through strength, violence and repression. Directed by Laila Soliman and performed by Hardy, along with musicians Neo Muyanga and Nancy Mounir, Museum of Lungs is a musical documentary performance about love, loneliness, fragility, and death.

• Laila Soliman lives and works in Cairo and previously presented Whims of Freedom and Zig Zig at the Kaaistudios. Stacy Hardy lives and works in Grahamstown. She is an author, journalist, multimedia artist, and theatre director. Nancy Mounir is a multi-instrumental, music arranger/producer and sound engineer, currently working and living in Cairo. Neo Muyanga is a composer and multi-instrumentalist, based in Cape Town. He writes music plays, chorus songs and works for ensembles, and performs both solo and in various band guises.