Description
Doina is a butoh performance presented at the international performance art festival It’s Gonna Be Hot in Belgrade in July 2023, the second edition of a festival created to give space to radical and experimental performative languages.
The title draws directly from Moldavian and Romanian traditions: the doina is a form of ancient folk song, a ballad of the soul that doesn’t tell stories but expresses profound states of nostalgia, desire, and belonging. It’s sung not to communicate, but to soothe, nourish, and be devoured from within. By choosing this title, Veronica roots her corporeal exploration in a specific cultural memory, transforming the performance into an act of belonging and, at the same time, of identity dissolution.
The work is a visceral and silent journey backward: a movement that doesn’t advance but retreats, that doesn’t construct but dissolves, that doesn’t remember but allows memory to fade again and again. The body becomes an instrument for uniting what has dissolved, for inhabiting empty space, for carving a sign of life where time consumes every trace.
The performance does not seek to preserve memory, but to navigate its disappearance. It’s an act of uniting the dissolved: reuniting fragments of identity, origin, and belonging that distance and time have rendered unattainable. The empty space is not absence, but a field charged with potential, a place where memory can still leave an inscription before fading.
Veronica’s butoh practice finds in Doina one of its most intimate expressions: the body as an archive of a culture, a language, an interior landscape that belongs to the artist’s Moldovan roots. An impossible return, executed nevertheless, with all the slowness and weight the gesture requires.
