City of Women: Olja Grubić: Extima#4: Living space
“I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live.” (Schweitzer 1991, 1203)
Living space is a fundamental physical condition for life, which we are increasingly destroying through pollution, extensive mining, urbanization of agricultural land, deforestation, the industrialization of agriculture with monocultures, and so on. On the other hand, our living space is also being increasingly reduced by climate change—more and more areas on the planet are becoming arid, water is turning into a commodity for capitalist profit, people are migrating to parts of the planet that are more livable, and megapolises are forming with huge population densities and significant social poverty… With unchecked development, we are rapidly destroying our living space. Humanity has become an invasive species that threatens its own existence.
The performance functions as a living installation, in which the stage elements physically claim space and reduce the audience’s space. In this way, art itself becomes invasive, taking space away from those to whom it is intended (the audience), and is thus embedded in the same neoliberal ideology of production, growth, expansion—of some abstract form of development that is self-justifying…
Living Space is the fourth part of the Extima cycle, which explores what it means today to be a living being in a living world. It asks whether, in the generic projections of a “better” future, a “better” life, a “better” human, a “better” society—and in our intimate experience of life—there is still space for a living being in a living world.
Concept and space design: Olja Grubić
Performance by: Anita Wach, Kristina Aleksova, Loup Abramovici, Olja Grubić
Sound design: Vid Drašler, Eduardo Raon
Lighting design and technical direction: Špela Škulj
Producer: Špela Trošt
Production: Via Negativa
Organisation: City of Women
In collaboration: Bunker and Old Power Station – Elektro Ljubljana
Supported by: Ministry of Culture, Municipality of Ljubljana.