A Scream for Eiko Otake
Sweden, 2023
Statement
In place of a personal manifesto, I’d rather engage in the manifestation of my multitudes and touching of some of the pronouns. It must be said that the choice of pronouns is a moment-to-moment, sensually spatial activity, and the constant assertion of one’s boundaries gives rise to a hunger that can only be satisfied by the kill.
To the unfading sighs of “there are no ‘us’ ” and “who are ‘we’?”,
it’s worth adding: “and who is this ‘I am’?
and continue with some exclamations:
but me — a theater!
me — a grove!
me — a bucket!
Running line:
The practice is anarchic, bodily-discursive, reaching for the continuity of time. It seeks direct contact with reality, thinks through collision, and exhibits bodily vulnerability in the face of overly complex questions and basic concepts like fate and death.
Choreography is seen as syntactical exercises around emptiness, or exploration of the world through syntax.
Like the creation and resolution of problems with verbs.
For example, the verb “to be”.
– “Let us be!” (a literal translation of “Bud’mo!”, a traditional Ukrainian toast). Being is always in abundance. And yet, in the “let’s be” call, there’s a certain surplus, a tautology, which elevates our inherent, uninvited, and unregulated being to a ritual and at the same time, recognizes it, captures it in the moment of movement in plurality. This movement is neither directed spatially nor into the future. It’s more like a fountain.
And it is possible to effortlessly see “us,” gathered with cups around this fountain.
(!)
In the second year of the fullscale war, I realized — the only thing that interests me (worth working on, deserving attention, and focusing on), and I should be fully heard right now without interruption— is the search for eternal life.
We gather not only around the fountain. (!) We often find ourselves around a crater, we above a pit. Then — we at the dinner.
Those blinded by the rainbow, losing the ability to drive a vehicle. We, when we share food and now have the same things inside us. We, when we witness a dance.
I look at myself and sigh:
Who are “we”?
Like when I’m pregnant?
Or when illness indicates the permeability of my barrier with the external.
When I sleep, or when a dog enters the room.
(!)
a dog enters:
— Spirituality not as contact with the higher, but as contact with the other.
The song is playing.
What if art was a manifestation of encounters that occurred under exceptional conditions or a place for those encounters that could not happen anywhere else?
They (here it’s “we,” left in the past):
On the first day, they were in the garden, and therefore wondered if the escape from fate could be theater in the garden?
Attention now!
—In that garden where they want to live, there’s a daily process of subjectivation of all actors, so relationships, inter-subjective relations require constant review, are in dynamic co-formation, demand active attention. The space of the garden exists through collective reproduction, because it is neither a project that needs to be implemented nor a pre-created given by someone.
—And what if we can not be together?
The greatest pleasure is to discover oneself outside the community, to recognize a foreign accent in one’s own speech.
The text was written in a collaboration with Kateryna Iakovlenko (2024).
The statement was created within the Secondary Archive project and was first presented on March 15, 2024.
Artist’s Bio
Olha Marusyn – born in 1986 in the village of Lanchyn, Ivano-Frankivsk region. She studied landscape architecture at Lviv National Forestry University and costume design and graphic design at Lviv National Academy of Arts. She also attended various dance and performance masterclasses. Her interdisciplinary practice combines choreography, performance, theater, video, and text work. Her main medium is her own body, which often extends into the environment – the landscape and the earth. Marusyn was a participant in the performative collective “The Abstract Finger (points to nothing)” and a co-founder and active resident of the soma.majsternia initiative. Forming groups and communities, as well as working with other artists, horizontal connections and relationships remain important for Marusyn, which, as in choreography, form a collective movement. With the onset of the Russian invasion, the artist participated in the volunteer initiative “Kukhnia”(the kitchen) which cooked for displaced persons from the eastern and southern regions including Roma people that fled from war to Uzhorod and managed humanitarian aid. She continues to focus on grassroots initiatives and actively participate in these processes, but she has also started to pay more attention to her own practice. Through her own body and habits, as well as their reevaluation, she tries to understand the times she lives in and the violence that was always embedded in the societal norm of peacetime.