performance/ work in progress/ 60 min/ 2022

I crossed the border of my motherland 2 weeks after the war with Ukraine started.

Leaving my loved ones in a radically new reality in which they are watched, threatened, and silenced daily. Their documentary testimonies signal: their/our habitual world is irreversibly split into two adversary camps, building the invisible yet sensed lines between people. The civil war swells like a tumor. "the Russian people will always be able to distinguish the true patriots from the scum and the traitors, and just to spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths", – the president says. 

 

My performance is an attempt to give space to the testimony of Russians who stayed, who cannot speak, who are – under threat of prosecution – not allowed to call the war by its name, who fear, and who are unsafe in their motherland. It is an attempt to pronounce the words that are left unspoken and need to be heard, an attempt to translate them into collective corporeal research.