After dealing with loss, grief and a toxic relationship, Susanna Amato tells Chloe Rowe of her hoarding, and how destroying the things she loves is good for her.
Susanna stands on stage, gripping a photo of her family in her hand. It’s a treasured memory, especially since she lost her father and sister, she explains to the audience. She can recall the happy moments, the feelings, the nostalgia, but she doesn’t need this photo, it’s too much. Taking one final loving look at her past, she shoves it into the shredder. Panic washes over, but then, relief. The physical memory is no more, but the feeling will remain forever.
Memories are bountiful in Susanna Amato’s life. Being a hoarder since she was eight years old, Susanna would collect every little thing she thought precious, from toys, to birthday cards, to letters, even a tablecloth from a birthday party was kept. These items remained and surrounded Susanna her whole life, piling high and taking over her life. Until she decided she couldn’t do it anymore.
“I felt a deep frustration and deep discomfort of feeling suffocated with the amount of stuff that I had and not really understanding why I was feeling like that,” she says.
But Susanna began to understand her hoarding when a toxic relationship with her partner ended in 2019 and left her questioning her life and everything she had been through. It brought up her past grief and took her back to 2012 when both her sister and father passed away.
“I was so heartbroken and so confused with my grief and just so utterly at the end of everything, I had a bit of a breakdown, and I was drinking a lot. I just started to look at all this stuff I had around me,” she says, “I was living in a shared house with two other people, and everything was in this tiny room, and I couldn’t breathe so I just started shredding everything, and I had an epiphany.”
And this epiphany led her to where she is today. Stood on stage for her show Landfill of Memories with boxes full to the brim with past souvenirs, wanting to help people understand hoarding and be able to work through her problems in the only way she knows how, performance.
“I wanted to share this journey with audiences and create dialogue around questions like, ‘am I a hoarder, or do I just struggle to let things go?’” she says, “The first show I was on stage for three hours, I thought I'd get through five boxes, but I actually got through a third of one box. There was shredded paper everywhere.”
This first show has led to many more, with boxes of her past packed up and ready to be unleashed to an audience.
But this is something that Susanna knows, something she has been doing for a long time. Her love for performance has been a constant in her life ever since she studied performing arts at the University of Salford in Manchester.
“As I got to my third year, I really enjoyed this combination of clown playfulness work as well as more live artwork that is more durational like contemporary performance art,” she says.
This further developed as she attended the French clown school, École Philippe Gaulier right after university.
Having this experience of performing and the passion to start a show meant that Susanna could work through her hoarding whilst also providing a new insight into hoarders for audiences all while doing something she loves.
“The most important thing for me and this whole journey is coming to terms with my hoarding. Hoarding has such negative stereotypes linked to it that I feel like it’s a part of the show to talk about these stereotypes of hoarding and how people treat you. They often feel like it's disgusting or overwhelming or you're unclean or lazy,” she says, “people don’t know what to say, they think it’s all rubbish, and dirt, but people are often fascinated by it too.”
People who want to open their minds to understanding the hoarding disorder and its many nuances can go to this show and get an entirely unique experience. Each show goes through a different box of Susanna’s objects and once they’re in the shredder, there is no going back, so every show is new. New box, new memories, new interactions, new emotions.
Shredding a memory is shocking, it keeps the audience on the edge of their seat. Why would anyone destroy something that is so meaningful and represents wonderful times in life? There is surely regret. But out of all of those mountains of memories, there was only one thing that Susanna regretted shredding.
It was a map. When she had attended the French clown school, she had highlighted every stop she had gone to on the metro system, a memory of Paris. “I remember picking up the map and thinking ‘oh no, I really don’t want to shred this, it needs to go in a photo frame and up on my wall’ and I stopped and just said ‘oh fuck it’ and ripped it in half. The whole audience gasped, and I shoved it in the shredder as quickly as possible and that’s the only thing I regretted,” she says.
And this is evidence of how far Susanna will go to manage her hoarding. The memories that are keepsakes for some have become a burden for her, and Susanna is determined to get rid of them, no matter the importance.
This determination to help others will continue even beyond the shows. “I have this amazing podcast where I invite guests to come on and they share three items in their life, one from their childhood, one from a tough time, and another from an amazing memory they’ll cherish forever and we explore them and at the end, they decide whether they will keep it or shred it,” she says. “There are some amazing stories that come out of these items, and I'm on my journey of coming to terms with my hoarding but a lot of people haven't even started theirs yet.”
The stories from the podcast, also named Landfill of Memories, will enlighten the listener on the importance of value and how this is something different person to person. It is for people who want to understand hoarding, whether it is their own or their friend or family member, or simply those who are interested. Susanna may be on her journey of coming to terms with her hoarding, but a lot of people are yet to start their own.
And this journey is a difficult one. There is no cure, but there is a way to manage, and Susanna has shown this. From emotional turmoil came an epiphany, and 20 years of crowded hoarding turned into an inspirational show and a clearer life and mind for Susanna.
“I'm not going to continue to hoard, because that will go against my process. I can't continue to hoard and shred and hoard and shred. I want to manage it,” she says, “I only have five boxes left and as I go through the shows it will be four boxes then three then two and then it will be one, and I don’t know how many shows that is. The show will finish when the boxes are empty.”
Follow Susanna on Instagram @landfillofmems for updates on her show and the upcoming podcast.
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