SOLIDARITY

The organizational team of Performensk regrets to inform you that the festival will not take place this year. The event along with this year’s theme “Recycling of memories” and all the invited artists are postponed to 2021. We will announce the new date as soon as it is specified.
Our decision was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the political situation in Belarus. As cultural workers, we believe that the main performance event of 2020 is happening right now all over the country, taking a wide variety of forms, and we encourage anyone concerned to take part in it.
Cooperation and consolidation in public areas are strategies that Belarusian people successfully employ, fighting this way for their rights. Following the example, we would like to team up with the festival participants from this and previous years and transform this edition of Performensk into a virtual platform for expressing solidarity with Belarusians and everything they are forced to go through in these times. Solidarity Art Archive will be published on our web page. This invitation is open not only for the participants of the festival, but also for everyone who wishes to join. If any of your friends have this intention, we will gladly publish the work.All the participated works we publish below and on our fb page.
To participate is enough just to follow the form.
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Daniil Galkin
A Trampoline or Social Critical Voyeurism
Government officials often abuse the power entrusted to them by using state property for their own benefit. Such behavior cannot fail to outrage people and incite interest in the things covered up by the “high fences” of these officials. Thus, the project “A Trampoline or Social Critical Voyeurism” offers its viewers to indicate whose fences they would like to peep in with the aid of a trampoline, thus taking the opportunity to examine the territory concerned without trespassing. As a consequence, the trampoline displayed in the gallery space symbolizes the encounter of people with the ruling machine and the subsequent traumatic experience, similar to blows on the head caused by trampoline jumping in low-ceiling premises. The exposition also incorporates “soft fences” – an imitation of concrete fencing slabs (PO2) which were used in the USSR (and still used in the post-Soviet states). And since any fence performs a protective function, we have produced it from “PO-2 Pillows” to underscore the aesthetics of the soft walls in psychiatric institutions. Thus we propose a method to describe how people are manipulated and confine themselves to the comfort zone, not seeing the concrete foundation behind the soft facing which also has a protective function but in keeping with the traditions of a penitentiary state.

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Noel Molloye
26 YEARS OF SUNDAYS THE TWILIGHT ZONE
Performance created in solidarity with the Civil Rights Marchers from 1972 Bloody Sunday when 13 marchers were murdered by British Troops in Northern Ireland.This performance was created at the first Navinki99 International Performance Festival in Minsk in 1999 as the reaction of the political struggles at that time.
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Eva Dabara
A ROOM OF MY OWN
The book I am engaged with in the performance is Marina Abramovic’s memoir WALK THROUGH WALLS, which may serve as a metaphor for fighting against any restrictions preventing a legitimate freedom.
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Makoto Maruyama
A MAD TEA-PARTY. Poetry
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Lucia Bricco
MOTIVATION LETTER
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Antonin Brinda
TRIPTYCH WITH A PROLOGUE
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Kathie Halfin
LABOR OF LOVE
“Labor Of Love” is an interdisciplinary live performance and ongoing project. This project has multiple iterations exploring the questions of agency, identity, the will for freedom and solidarity as a personal and collective value. During the performance, artist interacts with the the clay barricades which she confronts and pushes. Through a series of actions with the barricades Halfin tells her resistance story. She squeezes the malleable clay mass at the first barricade with her body and shares what is dear to her and what she loves. Further, she approaches a second barricade and shares about her Soviet childhood, the experience of the Soviet Collapse. Kathie ends by reclaiming her past and her identity by transforming, throwing and flattening the clay blocks barricades and exclaiming her personal chants.



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Theresa Schrezenmeir
“Dad, actually you are wearing very suitable clothing for shooting a video for the solidarity archive for Belarus. Would you like to make a video with me? …..and no, I did not know, that mum was sewing your facemasks out of old American-flag-patterned bedsheets.”
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Rufina Bazlova
THE HISTORY OF BELARUSIAN VYZHYVANKA, 2020
