"Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language." Elaine Scarry

At the beginning of 2022, Tatiana Kocmur began to focus her artistic research on historical and contemporary problems of physical and sexual violence and the concept and language (or rather non-language) of pain. The Following Body is the first visual articulation of this exploration.

This performance shows a hard-to-understand, or, more precisely, unimaginable change and impairment of the organism due to the sudden action of an external force. The internal conflict of understanding, acknowledging, and accepting a different body structure is visible externally in the performance in the form of two semantic entities: The dance of silent formations is sensual and at the same time aggressive. Their interdependence and inseparability define their relationship. At one point they are seen as lovers, but in the very next one as opponents. They become an exhibit of love and hate. In a slow and painful intertwining of the two, the roles of aggressor and victim are mixed. Their movements make (un)pleasant sounds that remind us of everything that didn’t and cannot arrive at articulation because of the post-traumatic syndrome and the fear that appears with a demanding, traumatic experience.

The performance is dedicated to Juana and all victims of sexual violence.

Images and sounds, used to create a composition for live performance, were selected through the artist's conversations with individuals who experienced sexual abuse in their youth.

Author and performer: Tatiana Kocmur
Dress: Jaka Grm
Voice: Juana
Video: Domen Martinčič
Video editing and sound: Tatiana Kocmur
Object construction support: Stefan Doepner
Implementation: Liza Šimenc
Photography: Nina Pernat
Mentor: Matej Kejžar
Production: Pekinpah

If the gesture itself is something that, in the broadest sense, can perhaps be considered an intuitively accessible artistic display of an attempt to liberate the body from the pressures it experiences in its surroundings, what is so much more interesting is the way in which the performance The Following Body combines and juxtaposes various minimalist, but semantically very meaningful, elements.
Delo, Anja Radaljac, 3 December 2022