Description
Embrace of Discomfort: A Surreal Exploration of Freedom is a 30-minute butoh performance that premiered at It’s Gonna Be Hot at Pandora Gallery Kreuzberg in Berlin on August 30, 2024, an international performance art festival organized by artists Nancy Goerlach and Yagmur Tacar.
The work explores the body in crisis as a territory of potential transformation. Through the lens of the surreal, Veronica constructs a seemingly ordinary space that gradually reveals itself to be unstable, ambiguous, and disturbing. A wooden chair becomes an object of tension and dialogue: not a simple stage prop, but an interlocutor, an obstacle, an extension of the body itself. Everyday gestures crack, reality becomes porous.
The performance questions the boundary between constraint and freedom, between identity and dissolution. What happens when you stop running away? Is reality really as tangible as you think? Do you recognize your power, or does it manipulate you? These questions don’t seek answers, but rather open cracks in the fabric of reality, inviting the viewer to question their own certainties.
Veronica’s body experiences extreme physical states: from tension to collapse, from control to abandonment, from magnetic presence to near disappearance. The margin—a central theme in her research—is the place where the body in crisis becomes the possibility of inner revolution. Identity. Transformation. Reality.
The original music by Marek Jason Isleib —a composer and performer with whom Veronica regularly collaborates—creates an organic and destabilizing soundscape that amplifies bodily states without ever overwhelming them. The costume, designed by Veronica herself, opts for apparent simplicity: everyday garments that betray their context when the body inhabits them in a radically different way.
