Realisation: 2022
Concept and choreography: Viktorija Ilioska in conversation with Nastya Dzyuban, Laura Stellacci
Performing: Viktorija Ilioska, Nastya Dzyuban
Voices: Amélie Haller, Maren Küpper
Sound design: Laura Stellacci
Coproduction: Lokomotiva – Center za nove pobude v umetnosti in kulturi / Choreographed bodies program, Life Long Burning (LLB) / Program Performance Situation Room, NDA Slovenija in Viktorija Ilioska
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Macedonia, Creative Europe (Life Long Burning)
There is something constructivist, engineering-like, almost scientific about the choreographic approach of dance artist Viktorija Ilioska. It is not a matter of aesthetic fascination with historical avant-gardes, but rather a kind of developmental re-enactment in which the intersection of art and life, as we know it from the era of historical constructivism, confronts real contemporary questions about how any form of production affects the environment in which it takes place. For her text *Building as a Resource*, written for the catalog accompanying the guest exhibition of Macedonian artists at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, she draws inspiration from a quarry in her hometown of Prilep: the quarrying of natural stone on the earth’s surface creates an architectural negative in which production is reflected as a form of consumption. Dance, as a form that can only arise through its own material, bodily consumption, is just one of the metaphors that can be conceived in this context. Ilioska constructs her choreographic work precisely from the contradiction between the consumption of natural resources for the purposes of production and the compensatory procedures of introducing materials into human bodies, which, due to the harmful effects of the environment, must be maintained and their capabilities optimized. A perverted maintenance of balance. In the performance I Need a New Body, the author and her collaborators understand the body as existing at the intersection of a productive form and a material resource—an intersection that is not fixed, but dynamic and ever-changing.