Schweinerei

It must be born. Like a spirit emerging from the cunt.

What happens when a civilisation can no longer digest its own history?

In 'SCHWEINEREI', two figures lock themselves away in a bunker. They are twins. They are lovers. They are puppets, performers, spirits of the theatre. Fallen angels. They are repulsive and seductive at the same time. The last descendants of a Europe that has reproduced itself for centuries until it became sick. Behind them lie Versailles, Marie-Antoinette, Mozart, the aristocracy, the theatre. Everything that was beautiful. They have turned it into a paradise. But paradise is rotten. They party while the world outside perishes. They play, eat, make music. Their bodies become entwined. Their embrace turns into a knot. They love each other so much that they suffocate one another.

Then their bodies begin to speak out. What was swallowed up (culture, beauty, violence, guilt, desire) comes pouring out. They break through an inner wall. Inside becomes outside. Their artificial bodies begin to leak incessantly.

'SCHWEINEREI' is a love letter to the theatre and a reckoning with its ghosts. A state of being. An exorcism.

THE WHOLE GLOBE FOR A REAL SORROW.* Theatre is dead. Long live theatre.

Together with Lucie Plasschaert and Lucas van der Vegt, who plays Mozart on the fortepiano, Lieselot Siddiki builds a bunker that is a palace, a doll’s house, a body and a ruin. A place where past and present can no longer be distinguished from one another.

BORED. FRIVOLOUS. EXCESSIVE. SICK. SO SO SICK.

*from Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller

Lieselot Siddiki is a multidisciplinary artist. After studying fashion and independent design, she started a Master’s degree in drama at KASK in Ghent. Her practice spans theatre, performance, music, costume design and set design.

Siddiki builds worlds in the same way she used to build doll’s houses: chaotic playgrounds where beauty and decay meet. Her performances are living collages, constructed from hundreds of references centred on personal fascinations and political obsessions. Her work is visceral rather than cerebral: immersive, gargantuan worlds in which the emotional and the political constantly merge. Chaos and order, brutality and refinement, ecstasy and structure coexist within them.

Her works include Nachtzwemmen (2021, with Jarne Van Loon), The Importance of Being Flemish (2021, ZUIDPARK) and De Abrikozenboom/Kayısı Ağacı (2023, with Klüb Kilim). With Up Your Ass (2023, with Nona Demey Gallagher), she was selected for Radical Jung and Het TheaterFestival 2024, where it won the Acteursgilde Award for best ensemble performance. In The Truthful (2025), selected for Het TheaterFestival 2026, she created an autobiographical fever dream centred on the world of her evangelical uncle, Dr Nasir Siddiki. For Siddiki, every performance is a form of exorcism: giving a body to whatever preoccupies, haunts or fascinates her, and sending it out into the world.