Mending the Invisible

Mending the Invisible is an artistic project by Ivana Müller and Bojana Kunst that tries to mend holes in the social tissue and weave threads of time and space between various city realities through poetic, humorous and symbolic actions.

Mending the Invisible first came to life in 2024 in Ljubljana at the 27th Mladi levi Festival, produced by Bunker and Maska. The process of Mending the Invisible is permeated by the spirit of a relay race, for which multi-year duration and the passing on of creative positions are key. The first edition was conceptually led by Ivana Müller and Bojana Kunst with collaborators Ana Čigon, Ajdo Bračič and Urban Belina, while in the 2024/2025 season the creative processes are led by Ana Čigon, Jedrt Maležič and Petra Korent.

This work proposes a performative, participatory and poetic practice of collective actions of mending, during which we ‘repair’ the living environments of the participants in different ways.

These mendings can be historical, political, ecological, ethical, or symbolic in nature.

They can draw on the practices of poetry, social activism, performance art, urban planning, anthropology, architecture, etc.
The idea here is not to ‘teach’ the concepts and ideas of ‘repair’ but rather to invent and share imaginative, poetic, collective, metaphorical actions of healing and caring.

Nowadays we have mostly entrusted repair to experts and professionals (urban planners, maintenance workers, architects, infrastructure specialists, health professionals and technicians, lawyers and politicians), often overlooking and forgetting that repair is also something that is still in the process of building communities, not only part of everyday community relations, but also part of a community’s imagination of its future life.

Such repair cannot heal the wounds of our worlds but can maybe alter our individual and collective point of view on the experience of the common, orienting us more towards the lines of care and support. In this practice, we are therefore proposing a performative setting in which we will bring different people together to share various imaginations on collective mending / repair and which can continue for a longer period into unknown future.

CREDITS

  • Idea and concept: Ivana Müller and Bojana Kunst
  • Produced by: Bunker and Maska
  • Co-produced by: ORLA and Le Pacifique Grenoble

The first version of Mending the Invisible (Krpanje nevidnega) will take place in Ljubljana in August 2024 during the Mladi Levi festival, co-produced by Bunker, Maska and ORLA.

The second version of Mending the Invisible (Réparer L’Invisible) took place in November 2024 in Grenoble, hosted and co-produced by Le Pacifique, centre de développement chorégraphique and ORLA.

Bojana Kunst

Is a philosopher, dramaturg, performance art theorist and full professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, Justus Liebig University Giessen, where she leads the international master program Choreography and Performance. Her research interests are contemporary performance and dance, art theory, performance and politics, gender studies and philosophy of contemporary art. Her essays appear in numerous journals and publications and she teaches and lectures extensively at various universities in Europe and around the world. Many of her book, including her lates The Life of Art: Transversal Lines of Care were published in Slovenia by Maska.

Ivana Müller

Is a choreographer, dancer and theater maker. Through her choreographic and theatrical work as well as her performances, installations, texts and videos, Ivana Müller explores poetics of language, rethinks the notion of body, movement, voices and their forms of representations, revisits the place of imagination and the imaginary, and questions the idea of participation. She often explores the idea of social choreography, activating communities or groups reflecting on the relationship with surroundings and environments they live in.
She also teaches/has taught frequently, namely at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, the University Paris 8, P.A.R.T.S. Brussels, DAS Theater -Amsterdam and elsewhere.