T H E B O R D E R /
G R A N I C A – WACHOWICZ/FRET Studio performance

When: 14.11.2024 (Thursday), 6pm
Where: Galeria Labirynt, ul. ks. J. Popiełuszki 5, Lublin
Language: event in Polish. No translation into Ukrainian and English.
Free entrance

T H E B O R D E R / G R A N I C A
WACHOWICZ/FRET Studio performance
Suitable for viewers 18 years of age or older, contains scenes of nudity

‘At first, T H E B O R D E R / G R A N I C A was to be a documentary on Antonina Romanova. The war kept Antonina at the front, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t join us on a later iteration of the performance. My subsequent work on THE BORDER took me to a completely new place, to which I invited Olena Matoshniuk, a painter who supports Ukrainian artists living in Poland. All this happened thanks to Jarosław Fret, who, on hearing Antonina’s story, persuaded me to evoke it, to make it present.

T H E B O R D E R / G R A N I C A is about creating a new, intimate language of Those Who Are [Not] Present, a language that is no longer ‘barbed wire’. By saying ‘barbed wire’, I want to evoke the image of a prisoner’s dialogue with the outside world, or of a refugee staying behind that wire. We are surrounded by a choir of voices saying that what we want it humanity rather than barbed wire.

T H E B O R D E R / G R A N I C A balances on the edge between performance, ritual and ceremony. It becomes a ‘rite of passage’ before our eyes. It opens up a new vista where time is just a moving image of eternity.

T H E B O R D E R / G R A N I C A took its final shape in Scotland during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. That Fringe version, featuring
myself and Antonina Romanova, was created in collaboration with Jarosław Fret as part of the WACHOWICZ/FRET Studio.

The project was born out of the desire to give a voice to those whose voice has been suspended.’

[Monika Wachowicz]

T H E B O R D E R / G R A N I C A won the Scotsman’s Fringe First 2024 and was nominated for the Brighton Fringe Excellence Award.

Idea: Monika Wachowicz
Collaborator: Jarosław Fret
Performers: Antonina Romanova, Monika Wachowicz
Text: Antonina Romanova, Monika Wachowicz

The performance incorporates excerpts of a video recording of Antonina Romanova’s actions undertaken as part of the Text project.

Set: Jarosław Fret, Monika Wachowicz
Video editors: Maciej Mądry, Jarosław Siejkowski
Running time: approximately 40 minutes

Production: the Grotowski Institute and Monika Wachowicz Body and Emotion Studio

First performed on 2 April 2023 at the Grotowski Institute, Wrocław

Previous presentations:
Diversity/Equality Festival, Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design, Wrocław, 9 May 2023
Saving Hope: Theatrical Artivism in Spaces of Conflict, symposium, the Grotowski Institute, Wrocław, 17 June 2023
Ukrainian Art Week in Poznań, Tłusta Langusta, Poznań, 26 August 2023
International Forum of Performance Art, Thessaloniki, Greece, 22 September 2023
Art In the Service of the Spirit and the Body series, BWA Contemporary Art Gallery, Katowice, 17 December 2023
Edinburgh Fringe, Edinburgh, Scotland, 16 performances from 3 to 24 August 2024

Antonina Romanova is a non-binary director, actress and performer. Antonina creates original artistic projects and plays the ukulele. Born and raised in Crimea, Antonina has Russian roots but is a citizen of Ukraine.

WACHOWICZ/FRET Studio is a creative tandem whose first completed work, Sheol/ שְׁאוֹל, was created in December 2021. The artists focus on the interpenetration of theatre and performance art and on the complementarity of the two in each act on stage. Marked by hybridity and openness, the Studio’s works can be described with words such as performative installation, séance and action. Their common denominator is sonority and exceptional focus on sound and vibrations associated with even the smallest of actions. Wachowicz and Fret regularly collaborate with artists for whom musical sensitivity is paramount in defining the interpersonal and the quintessentially human. The Studio often uses tools derived from the tragic tradition rather than the dramatic one, aiming at what the artists describe as intravenous Hearing of the World!

The event is part of the Grotowski Institute’s project Perform[ing] Poland. To find out more, go to the link.