The theatrical reading “The Eighth Life”, directed by Salvatore Tramacere, will premiere on 10 October 2025 in Lecce, at the Cantieri Teatrali Koreja. The event is part of the Nationally Relevant Research Project From Post-Trauma to Ecology: Contemporary Gender Narratives in Slavic Cultural Texts, which investigates post-1989 texts as a key to understanding the metamorphoses of trauma, eco-social transformations, and gender identities. On stage, the three thematic axes of the project take on scenic form and voice: trauma and post-trauma emerge as the central thread, exploring the obsessive return to the past and the possibilities of self-reconstruction through memory and dream; eco-literature examines the links between environmental crises and social change, between sudden catastrophes and slow violence; gender narratives open up fluid spaces of identity construction, capable of breaking binary models and proposing new visions of contemporary society. The Eighth Life is a performance in which word, sound, and image intertwine. A visual landscape – composed of video, painting, film, music, and song – interacts with contemporary Slavic prose and poetry, creating connections between different worlds, times, and perspectives. Voices from Russia, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Uzbekistan guide the audience on an emotional journey that traverses the personal and the collective, the intimate and history. With “The Eighth Life”, research becomes performance: literature, art, and critical thought merge into a single aesthetic experience, transforming knowledge into emotion, memory into vision, and narrative into shared experience.