The performance is a 20-minute extract from the theatre play Silent Days, Sleepless Nights, performed by the two researchers who conducted the inquiry. The theatre play developed during a theatre workshop involving doctors and nurses from the emergency department of Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo (Italy), aimed at exploring and giving voice to the traumatic memories experienced during the initial weeks of the Covid crisis, in March 2020. The authors participated as ethnographers, with one also acting as a playwright, guiding a deeply collaborative process of writing and staging. Silent Days, Sleepless Nights – performed by the same doctors and nurses – premiered in March 2023 at the Teatro Sociale in Bergamo.

The extract-performance to be presented aims to revitalise the affective and epistemic force of a collaboratively created narrative, in which theatre functions as a site of knowledge generation rather than mere representation. Designed as an epistemic laboratory, the theatrical process exemplifies care as a contextually situated, relational, and materially grounded practice, co-developed through interactions among healthcare professionals, theatre practitioners, and researchers. By portraying the emergency department as a socio-technical assemblage of bodies, protocols, affects, and technologies, the performance highlights how care is an ongoing, active process rather than just a static application. Engaging with debates in Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) and Medical Humanities, the authors (Parolin & Pellegrinelli, 2025) show how theatrical practice can influence knowledge production, offering alternative perspectives on care that question prevailing clinical and institutional narratives.

References:

Parolin, L. L., & Pellegrinelli, C. (2025). Theatre as Techne: How to Account for the Epistemic Work Across Arts and Science. Tecnoscienza–Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 16(2), 53-73.