Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans and the American Century) is a script-based performance jointly authored by Sanja Grozdanić and Bassem Saad that contends with the possibility and mutability of mourning through protracted catastrophe. Performed by Sanna Helena Berger and Selin Davasse, the piece begins with two discrete roles—that of traveling eulogists—the frame of who or what is being mourned appears to shift and unsettle as the work unfolds. The duo recalls both the recent and distant past as if from a discontinuous identity and temporality. Their memories and musings are recurrently interrupted by the spectral presence of a third voice invoking what is called “the American Century” (1948-present). Did the Century end in Afghanistan, Syria, or Bosnia? Is it unending? A digressive back-and-forth builds toward an uncertain eulogy. 

Across numerous iterations since 2021, Permanent Trespass has developed a distinct formal language through a process of continuous re-writing. Ultimately, the work gives form to the double exposure of past and present occurring at moments of historic transition, altogether refusing a stable ground, and shifting tenor from the comic to the nostalgic, the melancholic to the absurd. To quote the first lines of the performance—everything must go.