Viktorija Ilioska: I Need a New Body (2022)

Thursday, 30 November 2023 at 9:00 p.m.
Kino Šiška, Katedrala

The consumption of natural resources in the necrocapitalist present coincides with the need to optimise depleted bodies belonging to the same paradigm of production. Viktorija Ilioska plays with this contradiction in her choreographic acts, in which the body is both a natural resource and an object of bodily optimisation. One of the most outstanding dance works from the region of the past year.

There is something constructivist, engineering, almost scientific in the choreographic interest of dance artist Viktoria Ilioska. It is not merely an aesthetic fascination with historical avant-gardes, but a kind of developmental reiteration in which the contact between art and life, as we know it from the time of historical constructivism, is confronted with the actual contemporary issues of how all production affects the environment in which it takes place. In her text “Building as a Resource,” written for the catalogue accompanying the Macedonian artists’ guest appearance at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, inspiration is provided by the quarry in her home town of Prilep: the quarrying of natural stone on the surface of the earth creates an architectural negative in which production is mirrored as a form of consumption. Just one of the many parallels that can be drawn from this metaphor is dance as a form that can only come into being through its material, bodily expenditure. Ilioska’s choreographic work is rooted in the contradiction between the consumption of natural resources for the purposes of production and the compensatory processes of introducing materials into human bodies, which need to be maintained and their capacities optimised in light of the damaging effects to the environment. A twisted maintenance of balance. In I Need a New Body, the artist and her collaborators understand the body at the intersection between productive form and material resource, an intersection that is not definite, but dynamic and in a process of constant change.

Concept and choreography: Viktorija Ilioska in conversation with: Nastya Dzyuban, Laura Stellacci
Performance: Viktorija Ilioska and Nastya Dzyuban
Voices: Amélie Haller and Maren Küpper
Sound design: Laura Stellacci
Co-production between: Lokomotiva-Center for New Initiative in Arts and Culture / Choreographed bodies program, Life Long Burning (LLB) / Performance Situation Room program, NDA Slovenia and Viktorija Ilioska
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of North Macedonia, Creative Europe (in the frame of Life Long Burning)

Duration: 50 min
Entry: 8/10 EUR

Supported by:

A discussion will follow the performance, moderated by the Systering Collective. The discussion will be held in English.