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For Violence. Demonstration no. 1, the middle of Oxford House Theatre is transformed into a performance space. The audience can stand and walk around it.  The performance space has a floor covered in plastic. Dead flowers hang from the ceiling on the right side of the room and plastic bottles filled with dead flowers – some coloured in black - hang on the left side of the room. A giant plastic teardrop cries throughout the whole piece. One of the bottles filled with flowers drips water. And after a while water runs out. Icebergs inside water bottles melt in the performance space and in the foyer, where sounds from the performance space are amplified for people to transition into my performance. Icebergs are made of the same liquids used to tell stories on the OHP projector: water, blue and black colouring, oil and bleach. They are at different melting stages. Dripping water together with the sound of scissors cutting plastic make up my piece’s sound scape live. My performance is composed of two parts, equally necessary despite the first being 40 minutes long and the second only five minutes. In the first part I alternate cutting plastic bottles into small pieces and dripping drops of liquids on the OHP projecting on a big screen. By using these materials and making them interact with each other, I visually tell recurring patterns of stories that I heard while interviewing refugees. These are stories of journeys across oceans and land. Stories of life and death. My projected visual narrative could also be seen as exploring water itself, its cycle, its distribution and pollution. Nevertheless both migrants and water’s stories do incriminate violence. Incessant violence. The wars refugees difficult escape as asylum seekers in the West. All deaths they witness. Violent exploitation causing oceans’ pollution, climate change and water scarcity. The second section of my piece is a funeral for migrants who will never get one because they died in water or in too dangerous places. Dead corpses hang throughout the whole piece from the ceiling in the form of dead flowers. Upside down, looking like human limbs or fingers. The hanging water bottles full of dead flowers are bodies resting in peace. The loose flowers are not in peace yet. They are lost and forgotten bodies. In the end, I hang the plastic sheet that covers the projector full of stories – materials and liquids - to a flower. I fold it into a teardrop shape. And it cries. Black paint covers the loose flowers in a funeral. They are now ready to be closed into bottles as well. Violence has been demonstrated.

Violence. Demonstration no. 1

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