Show Her Clearance

The performance by the collective SQUIR is being held in public space, adjacent to the MSN Warsaw building, Plac Defilad, and ul. Marszałkowska. The actions are framed and observed from the windows on the first and second floors of the MSN Warsaw building (known as the “city rooms”), and play out in defined timeframes as a series of fragmented interventions. The collective consults the archive of Akademia Ruchu (Academy of Movement) and examines its strategies and experiences from the perspective of collective queer/feminist methodologies and sensitivities, drawing on artistic field research, the choreography of the everyday, and excess. SQUIR’s performance reverses the logic of a visit to the museum and the function of an institution that separates the artistic and unique from the ordinary. SQUIR’s actions are camouflaged among the everyday events playing out at street level. They invite the audience to look away from artworks on white walls and to direct their gaze out the window, to view the world outside the museum.

The Academy of Movement was founded in Warsaw in 1973 and acted at the intersection of performance art and theater in public space. The happenings of the Academy of Movement were based on the belief that artistic and political radicalism and the poetic need not be mutually exclusive, but art should be part of everyday life. The performance Show Her Clearance arose from work on embodying the archive, improvisation and poetry, deposited in the form of scores (text and drawings), instructions, notes and traces. It is not so much a recreation or quotation from the work of the Academy of Movement, as a return to the very sources of their practices and strict tactics: a concentration on simple, expressive moving and visual gestures; sensitivity to the concreteness of place; transformation of everyday life. SQUIR condenses time and space, testing the power of the neo-avant-garde as queer/feminist strategies of poetic resistance, group play, and humor.

SQUIR is an art and research group operating in the field of choreography, performance, and experimental education. The collective functions as a laboratory, and fits into the niche of extended choreography and community-building activities and activist social practices. The SQUIR group arose out of the Queer Academy of Movement community and the need for collective action, bonding, and embodying queer/feminist theories. The group’s interests orbit around the ecology of environments (including the work environment), maintaining community in a time of precarity and crisis, and work with the body based on choreographic methodology and somatics. The group is currently composed of Alicja Czyczel, Bartosz Jakubowski, Zoe Jouissance, Jagna Nawrocka, Alek (Aleksandra) Sarna, Magdalena Siemaszko, Ida Ślęzak and Paulina Woźniczka.