A life in numbers

When Janina Turek died, her daughter would uncover 728 notebooks, in which the Krakow housewife meticulously documented her entire life for 57 years: telephone calls made (38,196), appointments made (1,922), people to whom she said hello (233,979), the presents she gave (5,817), the number of times she played dominos (19), the number of TV programmes she watched (70,042), as well as many other minutiae of everyday life. Deflorian/Tagliarini set off on a quest: Why did Janina Turek record and count everything? And most importantly, who was she? This performance is a moving study of transiency and identity.