The initial point of our lecture performance “The Report” is a personal experience. Christmas Eve 2015 we, Blaue & Poppy, together with our baby Béla, were assaulted and robbed in Rio de Janeiro by two armed men from a favela. We assume that the reasons for the assault is poverty, caused by unjust distribution of common global goods. And that the global upper and middle classes are co-responsible for this unjust distribution. Being ourselves part of the middle class, we ended up turning the guilt-question on its head. In a “Criminal Complaint Performance”, at Sørlandets Art Museum in 2018, we “enacted” a law against structural violence. Then we “pressed charges against ourselves” for haven broken our own law by exploiting the underclasses, represented by the two men. Afterwards we went on an investigation journey to Rio de Janeiro, trying to find proofs against us selves. 

In “The Report” we’ll present the results, showing pictures from the night of the assault and the investigation. On a board, we are calculating the unhappiness and happiness the two assaulters and we have caused in each other’s lives: in the first place, before the assault, we had caused unhappiness in the lives of the two men from the favela, by supporting the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, watching it on TV. The event had negative effects for the poor: favela houses were removed, social programs cancelled. Then, by assaulting us in 2015, they produced unhappiness in our lives. As a consequence, they were caught by the police and went to jail, whereas we are giving performances, Julian began a well-paid PhD, and wrote several articles: paradoxical happiness for us, worked out on the background of the assault. Did we earn cultural and economic capital, by ‘selling’ our trauma? Calculating all the “happiness and unhappiness points” showed: we had produced more unhappiness in our assaulter’s lives than they in ours. In the end of the “Report”-performance we are announcing “The Trial Against Ourselves”.