Liars is a project supported by FELD/LAB, an initiative financed by the Goethe-Institut in Portugal and in partnership with the Portuguese platform Coffeepaste. 

In Liars, Henrike Iglesias, together with the performer Olympia Bukkakis and the audience, explore the power of highly mediatised court proceedings in the context of sexualised and gendered violence. The stage is transformed into the studio of a courtroom show. Using the example of the trial of US actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard, Liars questions what impact cases like this one, the associated media coverage and their reception in social networks, have on discourses around sexualised and gendered violence and abuse of power against people experiencing patriarchal violence.

Liars will be a performative court show, inspired by TV formats such as Judge Judy or Judge Barbara Salesch, in which the case will be analyzed as a pop-cultural narrative of our time. The trope of the "lying woman" has a long tradition in our Western and Christian-influenced society. What does it mean that in such court proceedings the focus is predominantly on the question of the credibility of the persons affected by violence? Which media and staging strategies can be recognised and exposed here? What role do we play as witnesses?

Liars will be an interactive performance, based on a combination of live video and a web-based software tool, that will enable the audience to use their private smartphones to write comments in a live chat room. The chats will be projected on screens throughout the performance in addition to the live video. This will give the audience the opportunity to comment on what is happening on stage and also to follow the comments of other audience members (or those of specifically deployed bots).

In the two weeks of residency at O Espaço do Tempo, Henrike Iglesias and Olympia Bukkakis will start experimenting with the textual material around the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial as well as other trials and cases around the topic of sexualized and gendered violence. The first week will be used mainly to collect, generate and discuss text. In the second week we will try out how these texts can be used by us as performers in scenes, in order to understand the next steps of working on LIARS, which will premiere in autumn 2025 in Sophiansaele Berlin. The residency will provide us with time and infrastructure for an important research period for this project.