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I.S.: From Which Club? to Lady Justice, your works seem to share the red thread of disempowerment, and address the individual within the bureaucratic system, immigrants, and art itself. You embody human fragility and at the same time you remind us how we all have the power to stand up for ourselves. Staying Alive also relies on the combination of restrictions and permissions, the regulation of rights, obligations and liberties, which are
additionally brought under stress by the migrant crisis.
J.L.V.: Mirna Žagar knows my work from the very beginning and she invited me to take part in Migrant Bodies because she thought it coincided with the subject matter they wanted to touch on. Migrant Bodies was an EU project (2007–2013), but Canada was also involved as an example of a state treating immigrants well. It was during our project that their laws pertaining to migrant issues deteriorated, which led me to explore the subject of rights, law and regulations regarding human movement in my dance piece, both today and in the past. One of the curators who launched Migrant Bodies wanted to approach the project as an activist cultural worker.II was intrigued, but it also felt demanding to take responsibility, as an artist, and face such a complex political subject matter. When we were kickstarting the project, the migration issue wasn’t yet that current in the media and it related mostly to Italy. As the project lasted for one year, within that time the migration situation in Europe escalated to the point that it became the most current subject in the entire world. For this reason, I decided to address in the performance why I’m dealing with such a highly political theme.It was important for me that the audience was aware that this was a commissioned work, as it clearly shows the role of the curators in the making of art today. The context in which the work grew was no longer only described in the programme booklet, it was present on the stage. I wasn’t certain if the curators would accept it easily, but finally they did, since the piece is imbued with humour. They even supported this solo when it was selected for Aerowaves. Staying Alive was not the only work created during the Migrant Bodies project.