Programme
BADco - Nikolina Pristas, Ivana Ivkovic
Croatia
PROTEST
performance
9 September 2006 at 12am
Trg Petra Preradovica 
By asking ourselves the question to what degree can a protest mobilize public space and impair its rituals, we are analysing the ideal act of the protest, often limited only to the semantic struggle, through entering a direct communication with the environment and passers by; marking the act of performance with the action itself, reinterpreting relationships of everyday communication on one of Zagreb's squares which, being far from agora, is defined, in the context of a series of festivals and promo actions, by its commercial and entertaining functions.
Our performance act is not the act of protest itself; our performance parasitizes on the notion of the protest's historical and cultural heritage and recognizable representations of the political protest, appealing to the protest as the power of perseverance; a power to transform being into (the power of) acting.
BADco. is a Zagreb-based collaborative performance group. The artistic work of BADco. is not so marked by the choice of subject matter as it is by the production of various problematic aspects of working in/as collaboration i.e. through specific ways of self-organization of the authors involved in a particular project during the process of work. Authors see their performances as performance machines which can enter various referential contexts such as social, political, intimate, dance and artistic contexts in general. Instead of thematic naming which stands closer to the traditional ideas of theatre the group prefers thinking in terms of eventality. Some key words for our thematic interest are: vitalism, virus material, collective, flesh vs. body, strategies of observing...