KRAJAČ_MARJANA: Short Fantasy about Reclaiming the Ownership over My Own Body (2011)

In March 2011 the residents of Zagreb started their several-month-long fight “We Won’t Give Away Varšavska Street!” for the disappearing public spaces in the centre of the city. In the performance Short Fantasy about Reclaiming the Ownership over My Own Body, activist and dancer Marjana Krajač placed herself in front of a photograph of a police cordon, highlighting the tension between the private and public space lost to capital in 2011. Krajač delivered a critique of a broken social and economic system, embodying rebellion and the aesthetics of freedom through her engaged art.

My body is not owned by me.
I am using it, I am perceiving the world with it. Complete perception in what ever ground is possible only through the fact of embodiment. If I would not be embodied I would not be able to read the world – the world would be
an amorphous unreadable mass of something indefinable. So, I am defining the world
and myself in it via the body. Still, however essential my embodiment may be for my own existence, I am not the owner of my body. My body is repressed by protocols, architecture, space structures, other bodies, education, dance education, physical survival, economical survival, emotional survival, pain; and, at times my body is also repressed by its very self.
If I am not the owner, that means that I am sharing it with some other instance, that some other instances too claim and execute the right to use my body: to navigate it, to count on it, to take my body into the responsibility. Choreographic practice then would be the place to zoom into this consideration: of reclaiming the body for limited space-time frame in order to own it fully again. And,
also to encounter other bodies in this frame which are also temporarily reclaimed, so that (though still burdened by our social codes) we can eventually establish some other form of transfer to each other, some other quality of humanoid consideration, some other common ground, instead of one that is repressively inscribed in the outer world.

Marjana Krajač  

(https://sodaberg.hr/wpcontent/uploads/publikacije/pdf/KRATKA_FANTAZIJA_O_PONOVNOM_USPOSTAVLJANJU_VLASNISTVA_NAD_TIJELOM.pdf)