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Bearded Ladies Cabaret is turning its closet inside out for an art installation about grief and loss.

“Priority Hoarding” will repurpose a mountain of old props and costumes to explore emotional baggage, lost cultural memory and the scars of theater life. The immersive installation will open this fall at 444 N. Third Street during the Fringe Festival and remain until the end of the year.

In its 16 years of theater-making, the company and its founder, Rose Jarboe, have created 30 original productions. Many have been on a shoestring budget, with the company making liberal use of cardboard to create costumes and sets.

“I love cardboard. It is utterly transformative and always cardboard, all at the same time,” she said. “My gender is a bit like cardboard. It’s always true to itself.”

Rebecca Kanach, co-founder and the resident costume designer, said she has learned to love cardboard the hard way.

“Rebecca has the burns, the cuts, the pokes,” Jarboe said.

“We joke that every show I’ve been to the ER,” Kanach said.

Jarboe said she and the company throw nothing away. Today, nine units in a self-storage facility in Northeast Philadelphia are filled with artifacts of queer theater: A cardboard sword wielded by an anachronistic Joan of Arc for a Bastille Day celebration, a cardboard shark that menaced the genderbending 007 spoof “Beards are for Shaving,” a cardboard iceberg that skated into the “Beards on Ice” capade, and a cardboard toilet seat that was once worn around the neck of the late Dito van Reigersberg, aka Martha Graham Cracker.

“It may look cheap, but it takes a lot of effort,” Jarboe said. “What is it that Dolly Parton says? ‘It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.’”

“Priority Hoarding” is planned as a makeshift airport terminal for the fictitious company Receding Airlines that audience members enter to discover luggage filled with objects from old Bearded Ladies shows. Many objects will have QR codes that link audience members to audio and video testimonials from Bearded Ladies performers and creative partners.

Some objects related to the Beards’ “Andy: A Popera,” a show about Andy Warhol that Opera Philadelphia debuted in 2015, will link to a recorded interview with star MK Tuomanen. Tuomanen says in the pre-recorded interview that playing Warhol led to their nonbinary realization.

“One of the most blissful moments of my life to date at that point was wearing the little boy tidy-whiteys and the bound chest,” they said in the recording. “It was a moment of utter secret trans joy, secret also to myself. The whole Opera Philadelphia choir was singing to me and affirming me as a little boy.”

Jarboe said Tuomanen’s experience was not unique.

“Back then, many of the Bearded Ladies did not identify as trans,” Jarboe said. “We were processing our identities and our genders quite publicly without really knowing ourselves what we were doing.”

“Priority Hoarding” will be more than a trip down memory lane. Jarboe is conceiving the show as a proclamation to establish the company’s legacy. She said right now there are forces afoot trying to erase them.

“We’re seeing two things happen: We’re seeing an active campaign from the government and people in power against LGBTQ rights, like erasing letters off of the Stonewall Monument online,” she said. “At the same time, we’re seeing art organizations fall with no to-do. UArts was a big thing, the school at PAFA ending, but mid-sized and smaller arts organizations end with no acknowledgment of the work that they’ve done and no care to the legacy.”

Jarboe said that the collapse of large-scale institutions like UArts triggers reams of press coverage, ongoing court cases over assets and property and political action around non-profit stewardship. But small arts organizations can disappear with barely a whisper.

The Bearded Ladies Cabaret has been a relatively successful organization that is “not going away anytime soon,” according to Jarboe, but she wants “Priority Hoarding” to echo the legacies of people and projects that have fallen to the wayside.

“Before the Bearded Ladies Cabaret there was Big Mess Cabaret. Before the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, there was Dumpsta Players. There’s [Charles] Ludlam,” Jarboe said. “Because we’re working in the corners and bathroom stalls of the arts community, because we’re often doing the most innovative work in tiny spaces, that history doesn’t get told. Especially if you’re not on the high-art plane. If you have a sense of humor, you’ve got to be careful about your legacy.”

For all its ambitions to speak to the moment regarding LGBTQ+ policies and the survival of the arts sector, “Priority Hoarding” is also about the physical process of purging. The airport fabricated from cardboard and the backstage confessions ultimately end with empty storage units.

“Trust me: There’s going to be plenty of stuff for you to take home and for you to deal with it,” Jarboe said.