Mi Amigo Giovanni: A digital engagement of friendship, community and queer love through a Zoom performance

This chapter offers a duoethnography that reflects on the experience of writing, rehearsing, and staging the online performance Mi amigo Giovanni, a digital autoethnography crafted in acknowledgement of the ongoing grief experienced after the death of a close friend. Created through ‘documents of life’ and conversations between friends, family, and strangers, Mi Amigo Giovanni narrates how ‘Elliot’ and ‘Giovanni’ met as teenagers and follows them throughout university, their professional beginnings, their love relationships, and the relationships with their family of friends. Narrating key moments across a three-year period (from 2019 to 2022), the chapter highlights how this performance was crafted at the intersection of death, community, and gayness, and through which all the participants were themselves ‘re-made’ in different ways. The chapter shows the potentialities of digital performance to transform notions of community, friendship, and mourning.