No Woman's Land (Performance in Belgrade)

Abstract

In 2015 Ildikó and Rosie retraced Lucia’s footsteps. Crossing borders, climbing fences, bleeding, crying, blistering. We walked through the united and borderless Europe, witnessing a post-national utopia, particularly at the borders of Poland and Germany. Once separated by barbed wire, armed border police and animosity between the two countries, this area now runs joint cultural projects, has opened German-Polish Kindergartens, as well as setting up a floating bar on the river Neisse which had formed an insurmountable border for many decades. Whilst we were walking the refugee crises escalated, and elsewhere borders and fences were erected. The escalation of the crisis placed survival, identity and migration at the forefront of the project. The project’s historical and current context of migrant mothers, borders and displacement raises interesting questions with regards to the traditionally gendered assumptions of heroic walking. This practice as research project examines the process of transferring the politics of home and displacement and experience of walking into an autobiographical and familial performance (performing with family) through the inclusion of real (hi)stories. In the No Woman’s Land performance the performers re-create the experience as they (and sometimes spectators) walk on treadmills. Through kinaesthetic empathy the audience are affected by witnessing the walking, the breathlessness, the sweat. No Woman’s Land investigates authenticity with a critical poststructuralist perspective: the familial micro-narrative of the grandmother deconstructs phallogocentric views on history often represented through the male war hero, and highlights women’s experience of migration.