CARCOMA
Based on the novel Carcoma

by Layla Martínez

Gen 260

In a house thick with shadows, figures of saints, and folk superstitions, two unnamed women – a grandmother and her granddaughter – live in seclusion, as though they have inconspicuously merged with the very walls that surround them. When a child’s disappearance turns the gaze of the community and the intrusive glare of the media upon them, their confessions unravel into a familial palimpsest of silence, masculine violence, and class corrosion.

CARCOMA originates from this dark, deeply haunted universe as a free stage adaptation of the novel Carcoma by Spanish author Layla Martínez (published as Woodworm in English). First published in 2021 by the independent feminist press Amor de Madre, the book struck a wide nerve, going on to be translated into more than fifteen languages.

In this stage version, the house becomes a living archive of violence, while the stage emerges as a site of ongoing disintegration. The two narrators address us from an in-between realm, oscillating between confession and invention, assembling their own haunted chronology through temporal leaps and innuendos. They are discreetly accompanied by a strange chorus of women: shadows that rise from the house’s own entrails, a collective memory unable to find rest. Their kinetic language is worn and fragmentary – short breaths, eroded melodies, scraps of speech, and dislocated anagrams of the word agujero (ah-goo-heh-ro: a hole, an opening, a rupture) – as well as the sounds produced by their own bodies.

At the heart of the dramaturgy lies music; performed live by a classical guitar – played through unorthodox techniques that distort its timbre, such as the use of a bow or metallic objects – and a traditional percussion instrument, it is at once visceral and ethereal. The open-ended, experimental compositions interweave with the rhythmic breathing and low murmur of the “shadows,” forming an aural landscape that alternately embraces and fractures the action.

The performance explores the manifold ways in which trauma is passed down from generation to generation, like a torch: how humiliation, pain, and shame inscribe themselves upon the body, which remembers and holds what language can only arrive too late to name. In CARCOMA, events are “undermined” by the poetic and the transcendental. Where words are exhausted, there remain only countless small holes in the skin.

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Layla Martínez’s novel Carcoma was published in Greek by Carnívora Editions, translated by Aspasia Kampyli (2024).