After the platform, we asked five of the ten Moving Balkans artists to answer questions about their work in just one sentence. For some, they were only allowed one word. The result? Poetic, succinct insights that speak volumes and, for the most part, stick to the rules.
Answers from Christiana Kosiari (Greece), Marko Miliç (Serbia), Simona Deaconescu & Vanessa Goodman (Romania & Canada), Feliz Bozkuş Al (Turkey), and Linda Kapetanea (Greece)
What is the main motivation behind your piece?
Christiana Kosiari, Runway
To expose the absurdity and violence of beauty norms by relentlessly pushing the body to its physical and symbolic limits.
Marko Miliç, DILF
The question: is there a strong sexual fantasy beyond trauma, and a tender feeling that desire could survive the ruins it was born in?
Simona Deaconescu & Vanessa Goodman, BLOT – Body Line of Thought
To discover the worlds hiding beneath our skin, alien landscapes we carry without knowing.
Feliz Bozkuş Al, GONG
To move as if the body remembers something ancient and urgent, and give flow to life energy.
Linda Kapetanea, Silence
SILENCE that has been brutally banished from our current age of technology and information.
What is the standout feature of your piece?
Christiana Kosiari, Runway
A woman walking, stumbling, and catwalking on a never-stopping treadmill, caught in a grotesque loop of survival against beauty norms and aging, set live to electroacoustic soundscapes.
Marko Miliç, DILF
[My dancer Svetozar Adamović—his force holds the piece together, the way he moves, listens, resists spectacle, the way he shows up… it draws everything into a quiet intensity. He doesn’t perform the work; he becomes its core tension.
Simona Deaconescu & Vanessa Goodman, BLOT – Body Line of Thought
Information you can feel – turning scientific data into sweat, breath, and muscle.
Feliz Bozkuş Al, GONG
It is a silent storytelling through the body, with a strong theatrical presence.
Linda Kapetanea, Silence
SIMPLICITY as a guiding principle to present visual material that is raw and open to constant transformation.
Who would you like to watch this piece?
Christiana Kosiari, Runway
Anyone trapped in the loop of self-improvement, self-doubt, or societal expectations.
Marko Miliç, DILF
People who think they already understand what a DILF is and those who never imagined themselves reflected in one. Love and sex addicts, the performance-fatigued, anyone who craves control, who hates cliché but lives inside it, anyone still searching for the thin line between right and wrong, between pleasure and damage, anyone who has ever confused affection with approval, those who secretly want to be held and punished at the same time, and anyone who thinks they’ve grown out of desire.
Simona Deaconescu & Vanessa Goodman, BLOT – Body Line of Thought
People with too many tabs open.
Feliz Bozkuş Al, GONG
Anyone on the path of remembering their own life, essence, intuition, and meaning.
Linda Kapetanea, Silence
Anyone is a good audience for us, they are the true mirrors through which our work can become alive.
What feeling or idea do you hope lingers with the audience when the piece ends?
Christiana Kosiari, Runway
The unsettling sense that we’re always trying to keep up with social demands we never really chose, and how, consciously or not, they end up reshaping who we are.
Marko Miliç, DILF
A soft unease in the face of the permission to desire differently, and a reminder that desire doesn’t always resolve; it can remain quiet, unspectacular, and still entirely ours.
Simona Deaconescu & Vanessa Goodman, BLOT – Body Line of Thought
A strange kind of awe, the kind that makes you want to Google things on the way home.
Feliz Bozkuş Al, GONG
An impulse to move, to act or to remember.
Linda Kapetanea, Silence
I truly do not know, but I hope that they have been moved viscerally, rather than intellectually, and traveled with us during the performance.
What feeling or idea do you hope lingers with the audience when the piece ends?
Christiana Kosiari, Runway
Into a performative concert where many bodies of different ages, machines, and sound collide and regenerate dynamically in real time.
Marko Miliç, DILF
To become a living archive of erotic survival performed for men in uniform, whose service will go unacknowledged until they begin to grow lush gardens everywhere on the numerous military bases.
Simona Deaconescu & Vanessa Goodman, BLOT – Body Line of Thought
To keep growing like a culture in a petri dish – shaped by time, context, and new discoveries.
Feliz Bozkuş Al, GONG
I’d like to create new versions of GONG, each focusing on a different core theme from the piece, evolving into ritual forms.
Linda Kapetanea, Silence
It evolves by playing on its own – the joints of the performance are loose and so there is space for change and response.
Quickfire round! Respond to these prompts with just one word…
You as an artist
Christiana Kosiari
curious
Marko Miliç
askew
Simona Deaconescu & Vanessa Goodman
speculatrix
Feliz Bozkuş Al
sprout
Linda Kapetanea
moved
Your piece
Christiana Kosiari
persistent
Marko Miliç
dripping
Simona Deaconescu & Vanessa Goodman
tectonic
Feliz Bozkuş Al
soil
Linda Kapetanea
moving
Being an artist in the Balkans
Christiana Kosiari
resourceful
Marko Miliç
Lepenski Vir
Simona Deaconescu & Vanessa Goodman
resilient
Feliz Bozkuş Al
water
Linda Kapetanea
adaptable
