Cross-media piece blending live performance, documentary film and live electronic music about a mother and daughter's road trip across Ireland and Italy.
Aliens comes to The Black Box on Friday 23 October, part of the Belfast International Arts Festival. It's a co-production between Dumbworld and Curious Industries, and it doesn't fit into one easy box: it blends live performance, documentary film, archive testimony and live electronic music.
The story follows a mother and daughter on a road trip from the windswept beaches of Donegal to a small village in southern Italy, searching for traces of a forgotten history and a way to understand each other. The journey starts where the bodies of Italian immigrants washed ashore after the sinking of the Arandora Star. Many of those people had lived in Northern Ireland for decades, running ice cream parlours and fish-and-chip shops, before being classified as 'enemy aliens' and interned during the Second World War. The piece weaves their story with those of Italian immigrants in Northern Ireland and with the migrants, activists and strangers the duo meet along the route, asking who gets to draw the lines between us and them.
It's performed in English, French and Italian with integrated subtitles, and it's described as a meditation on inheritance, migration and those who live in between. It won the Beyond Borders Award and was nominated for Best Production at the Dublin Fringe Festival 2025.
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On the creative side, it's written and performed by Marta McIlduff and Alessandra Celesia, directed by Emily Mytton, with original music composed and performed live by Corgiat. The show runs for an hour and twenty minutes, starting at 7:00pm, and tickets are £15, with a £12 concession.
