VALENTINA

is a performance work created as a dedication to my grandmother Valentina, who turned 100 years old on January 7, 2025.

The work does not function as a biographical portrait or a reconstruction of personal history. It investigates how one life continues through another body — through gestures, materials, inherited movements, and forms of experience that remain even when they cannot be fully named.

Valentina’s life was shaped by displacement, poverty, survival, motherhood, separation, loss, and endurance. She lived between Central Russia and Siberia, raised four children, and remained married throughout her life, although she and her husband lived apart for the last thirty years.

Her story becomes a point of departure rather than a subject to be represented.

The performance explores the body as an archive: a place where different times, memories, and presences overlap.

During the action, the body moves between different states of existence. At times I become Valentina. At times I return to myself. At other moments I become an unknown figure emerging between memory, imagination, and inherited experience.

The boundary between one person and another becomes unstable.

The performance takes place inside an old storage closet discovered during my residency in Vienna. The architecture of this forgotten space becomes an active element of the work — a site containing traces of previous lives and invisible histories.

Inside the closet, I found a real swallow’s nest.

The nest was not introduced as an artistic object. It was encountered.

Its presence shifts the performance from a constructed environment into a meeting between human intention and accidental discovery. The nest becomes another material body: a structure formed from fragments, repetition, and available resources.

The performance develops through a series of material actions.

A doll falls from above into a basin filled with milk.

The impact damages the doll’s body, creating a moment of rupture.

The broken fragment is planted into soil and treated with lemon juice, creating an unstable relationship between care and damage, nourishment and discomfort, attraction and rejection.

A black scarf, made by Valentina from an old skirt, covers the performer’s face. The object functions simultaneously as clothing, inheritance, concealment, and transformation.

The materials are not symbols assigned in advance. They participate in the action.

Milk, metal, fabric, water, lemon, tape, earth, wind, and paper form a material score that determines the movement of the body.

At the final stage of the performance, the swallow’s nest and the broken doll become attached to my body with adhesive tape. I climb the ladder toward the roof carrying these fragments.

I do not carry only my grandmother.

I carry the unstable boundary between myself and those who came before me.

The body becomes a temporary site where different times, memories, and presences meet.

The work moves from descent to ascent.

Milk falls downward.

White feathers fall from above.

Between these two movements, a transformation occurs.

A broken object becomes part of a living body.

A forgotten architectural space becomes a place of encounter.

A personal history becomes a question of transmission:

What remains of another person inside us?

A person does not disappear completely.

Valentina continues — not as an image of the past, but as something moving through another body.

BIG THANKS TO

Mani De Pan // VIDEO

Marcel Plavec // PHOTO

and all the creatures involved