GIBANICA 2025: Agmysterium (The Fourth Time)

You can use the HEARING LOOP at the event. Please switch your hearing aid to T-coil.

Durational performance

1. Your Struggle (at 12 pm)
2. Preparation for the Present
3. Your Songs, Whose Dreams (at approximately 3 pm)
4. Prayer
5. And Suddenly It’s Evening (at approximately 19.15 pm)

The AGMYSTERIUM is the settlement of the author/performer with himself, which unfolds on his body in the form of a durational performance. It brings to the fore the question of the relation between the tangible, earthly, everyday and the sacred, poetic, transcendent. With the desire to transcend his own individuality, he looks autobiographically into the past and lays out memories as an obstacle course for universal questions: coming to oneself as the search for meaning; memory as the bearer of identity, its deceitfulness and simultaneous fatality; solitude as the basis of faith; and the unexpectedness of transcendent feelings in the small moments of existence. We were clearly mistaken when we imagined god greater than us.

It is the wonder of life as a great mystery on the elusive ground between detail and universe, moment and eternity, footstep and journey. It is a liberation from one’s own subjectivity and thus a departure from a rationally guided narrative. It is an approach to the associative, intuitive, dreamlike and also spiritual.

It’s a farewell to the time when “we were loved like children, for no reason, for the very fact that we exist.”*

In terms of forms, it reaches for two theatrical means – durational performance and butoh – and relies on their immanent element : absolute presence. It is precisely and only with this kind of positioning in the here and now that the possibility of a dimension beyond opens up.

Entrance will be possible throughout the performance.

Concept and performance: Klemen Kovačič
Choreography: Klemen Kovačič and Nik Žnidaršič
Text: Klemen Kovačič
Dramaturgy: Nik Žnidaršič
Collaborator for dramaturgy and choreography: Maša Radi Buh
Light design: Bor Ravbar
Sound design and original music: Gašper Lovrec
Stage interventions: Blaž Andrašek, Gašper Lovrec, Maša Radi Buh, Bor Ravbar, Nik Žnidaršič
English translation: Nik Žnidaršič
The interpreter of the English text: Blaž Šef
Production: Bunker, Ljubljana in Klemen Kovačič
Thanks: Tanja Zgonc, Alida Bevk, Slavica Janošević, Mateja Dermelj
Photo: Željko Stevanić IFP/Arhiv CTF UL AGRFT

For English-speaking guests: Part of the performance includes English audio, available via a QR code on-site. To enjoy the experience, simply scan the code with your smartphone (internet access and headphones required).

*Gospodinov, Georgi. Naravni roman (Natural Novel). Ljubljana: Študentska založba, 2005.