Together

Being together. An irresolvable problem for politics, an eternal ideal for performance.

“Touch always requires two,” says Mladen Dolar (Touching Ground, Filozofski vestnik, no. 2-2008). And the two must be close, physically within range of each other, present in the same space and at the same time. If we think of what it means to be together only in terms of touch, then the situation would be apparently simple. But the touch is not an exclusive moment of experiencing “togetherness.” “Together can be read in very different spatial and temporal dimensions, physical and mental spaces, but in the project of the performance duo Jurišić-Manić there is a strict conceptual and methodological limitation, which is directed towards the question of what it means to be together and how to be together.

By definition, performance art strive to experience what we share as an interdisciplinary intersection of time, space and (body) presence (of the performer and the audience). This “together” defines the event fusion, at once emerging and happening in the here and now. In that sense performance in itself creates its own parameters of what binds us. The project “Together” therefore therefore takes performativity conceptually strictly. The key question here, of course, is how. Today we are witnessing an unbearable inflation of performativity. Everything is performance, we are drowning in the omnipresence and mediatisation of everything. We quickly find reasons for what we have in common, but (almost) nothing keeps us together (for long). Being together requires an investment that is increasingly difficult to pay.

Leja and Marko deal precisely with this investment, but without looking for an answer outside of themselves, in some external site (a theory, a story, a mythology) that would make sense of their relationship. They turn the question inwards: Why do I want to be together (with him/her), how to endure being together, what to do (with oneself) so that “together” becomes a realisation of a surplus (in me), how to avoid the hierarchy of power (for that is not being together) …? And last but not least: How to establish this “together” in the performative time and space of the spectator?

Together cannot be a coincidence, nor is it a construct. The investment is risky because it has to be very precisely targeted. Leja and Marko are aiming at what they see in each other and in what they recognize each other. This is a point reduced to a minimum, which they are trying to cover at the time of the event. They insist on the body, the gaze, touch, energy flow … For this, they require time. The performance will last 6 hours. The word enters the event through the thoughts of Semira Osmanagić, which are being created and projected during the actual event. This is the gaze of the third seeking its own place in togetherness and which is always already an interpretation pushing on the invisible handles of the invisible doors into “togetherness.”

“The problem of touch as a problem of two, is a problem of counting,” says Dolar, and later continues: “We must begin with what cannot be counted or subjected to counting, with something that is neither one nor two. Where counting is irrelevant.” “Together” is a mythical place of fusion that “heals” the individual with the other, an experience of super-identification where the plurality turns into the One. “Together” is a surface on which we are constantly sliding – it cannot be stabilised, we experience it anew, always anew. The more we want to formalise the “together”, the bigger emptiness begins to gap in the “together”. For politics, an irresolvable problem, for performance, an eternal ideal.

Photo: Matija Lukić

Photo: Matija Lukić

Photo: Matija Lukić

Photo: Matija Lukić

Photo: Urška Boljkovac

Photo: Matija Lukić

Photo: Matija Lukić

Together

2018 • Irresolvable
Durational performance • 360 min

Conceived and devised by — Leja Jurišić, Marko Mandić, Semira Osmanagić, Bojan Jablanovec
Performers — Leja Jurišić, Marko Mandić
Writer — Semira Osmanagić
Performing strategy — Bojan Jablanovec
Producer Pekinpah — Žiga Predan
Producer VN — Špela Trošt
Production — Pekinpah, Via Negativa
Co-production — Kino Šiška

The performance randomly plays a selection of more than 300 songs chosen by Leja Jurišić and Marko Mandić. After six hours, the playback is stopped and the performance is over.