Sparks presenting: VN LAB 2014, public production

The working theme of this year’s VN Lab is “power”. To be more precise: it is the instinct-urgency-need triangle that constantly drives us to “build up” our personal position of power. And it’s not just about power with ideological connotations here – ideology is nothing but a form of power representation – it’s about that very type of power that comes to life in Darwinist determinism and functions as a precondition of every ideology, skilfully exploited by every social system thus far.

Programme:

• Brina Klamfer: THE BITCH, solo performance

• Stane Tomazin: POINT ZERO, solo performance

• THE CASTLE, Anxiety Study in 13 images (according to the motives by F. Kafka: The Castle)

“It is actually another Kafka’s (short) story that speaks of a machine used in a penal colony, which executes the prisoners by inscribing a specific law, violated by a specific prisoner into his body with tiny letters over and over again. This seems to be the most explicit and picturesque embodiment of an idea that we see recurring in Kafka’s opus. It’s a two-stage process; in the first instance we see subjectivity separated from the body that this exact subjectivity has been ascribed to and then we see this same body subjected to fixations and transformations of all sorts. In short – dehumanization and disembodiment. For a long time I’ve been struggling to identify the source of anxiety and claustrophobia that always so evidently come over me whenever I read Kafka. This performance is therefore not so much an attempt to dramatize The Castle as much as it seeks to explore and stage my own emerging feelings while reading Kafka. It’s an exploration of an anxiety of the body along with a clinically barren helplessness of the body of an-other.” Simon Belak

Direction: Simon Belak
Performers: Maruša Majer, Saša Pavlin Stošič, Vid Klemenc

Public presentations for the participants of the VN Lab are not an obligatory practice and neither does the VN Lab ensure any public appearances in advance. Production of a work of art is offered to those participants, who have succeeded in developing an interesting enough idea to be presented to a wider audience.