"Leaked/ Lettere" reading by Francesca D’Errico

Leaked/ Lettere is a reading, simultaneously in Italian and English (through recordings) of an epistolary text.

The text is a collection of letters written during Winter 2024/2025. The recipient of all these letters is my first friend of when I was living in London from Autumn 2019 until Summer 2020. We were both au pairs, and the letters are written six years after the narration. The dates are accurate; some days I wrote a lot, some days I wrote nothing. The stories are all true.

The first two chapters are handwritten diary pages, which I translated into English. These two are the only chapters that speak to no one, to a diary, to a screen, to a reader. The letters, instead, are all for my friend. Since before then, I never wrote about my time as a babysitter in London, I found it interesting to combine handwritten notes on loose papers, mostly in Italian, and diary pages together. The letters have all been written on my laptop, and I used Google searches, maps, and images to reconnect visually to the stories I wrote (which are part of the presentation).

The initial idea was to collect diary pages and title it “Leaked Diary”. Then the text detached itself from the diary form to become just letters. Using letters comes from the desire of being not too exact with information, not too explanatory, but more abstract, less caring of the reader, less babysitter.

This text is technical, it is about the hidden and the secret, it is about two girls working with hidden forms of organisation. It is about exploitation, it is not autobiographical, and it is a collection of stories. This text is a worker’s report. This text has been translated (or rewritten) into Italian, and the narration begins with the desire to leave and be far away, to then circle back to the desire of home and the return to the (non)original language.

Repetitions and lists are the core elements of this text, in which they become a playful way to unveil the requests and expectations of being a babysitter abroad for a family of 5. Questions, concerns, menus, adjectives, and descriptions are all used in the text as a guide to explain what home became and what housework entailed. Connecting the inside (of the house) with the digital (the websites for au pairs) explains the complexity and the precariousness of living and working with no contract.