THE PALACE: OUR TIME
Natalija Paunić
The word palace is spatial in nature, not only because it refers to a building, but also because of the kind of building it represents: grand, lush, dominant. Yet, as a title for an event, which is something performative and ephemeral, the word palace is representative of time. Dynasties rise and fall, palaces follow. At the sundown of all revolutions and political shifts that our society has survived, we can say that the time of dynasties (time of the palace) is our time: a time of hierarchies, power relations and plays, of ruling and serving; a time of inevitable and constant struggle.
Our time is a time of social segregation, division based on class, nationality, gender, race, physical appearance and ability, religious beliefs. Consider this: there is no story about love, school, youth or friendship as powerful as a story about power itself. Two light references can support this claim, one from popular culture and the other from real life: Bridgerton, a fictional recreation of royal histories, is the most watched Netflix show ever,¹ and the Queen of England has just celebrated her 70th jubilee, as reported by all the world’s media — the media of a world that is, by the way, falling apart in so many ways, politically, socially, economically.² All the while, our bodies are fighting for independence, for autonomy, for us to feel like they really belong to us, and not to somebody else. The fight for control over one’s own body is important for all, but especially for women. In her book “Witches, witch-hunting and women”, Silvia Federici compares historical violence against “witches” (as in, women; literally legislated femicide) with territorial conquest and the systemic structures of capitalism: the bodies that the capitalist system could not use, for reproduction or labour, it had to eliminate. This system will not allow an old, sick, or simply an unmarried woman, or even a widow — and a lower class citizen as well — to take up any space that could otherwise be subject to profit.
Because of all this, it is important that this Palace takes up both space and time. Space, because of the proto-capitalist distribution of Earth as territory; and time, because our time is not just a legacy of violence, because ours is the time that we can change.
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The Palace is a sequence of three performances, directed and carried out by three artists: Selma Selman, Marina Marković and Ivana Ivković. The project has been realised as part of Eđšeg cultural centre in Novi Sad, Serbia. This word means “unity” in Hungarian — incidentally, unity is an opportunity that is often taken away from women through misogynist practices and the pressure to compete against each other. Functionally, the building was used as a palace and an artillery (a place for rising, a place for falling). Reacting to the cultural and historical heritage of Novi Sad, the architecture of the space and the social structures of now, the authors take on three different positions in the narrative of The Palace. These positions are defined through roles that help imagine and define a script for a metaphorical castle: an emancipated noblewoman, a concubine and a queen.
Selma Selman speaks, vocally, using subjective language and gesture. Her work claims a freedom to use one’s own body and its sovereignty, with an intention to emphasise that knowledge is power. In the letters that she is reading, Selma is addressing Omer, but the audience does not know whether Omer is a fictional character, a deity, or an acquaintance, a brother, a lover, her homme fatale. Evidently, Omer personifies the patriarchy itself, the world we were born into, not the world we chose. Selma’s voice is angry and breaks at times, at other times it seems decisive and reproving. What remains is poetry, as Selma urges the world, urges Omer, to listen. Selma is not speaking to us, or at least not only to us who came watch her perform, but to someone who’s not here, and they should be — to an imaginary figure of power that does not know about her work yet; a figure that, in other words, bears no empathy for it; who has no idea ³, and perhaps they don’t even think about what that idea should be; who’s had access to knowledge from the beginning of their lives, but has used it, oftentimes, in wrong ways. In the constellation of The Palace, Selma represents a woman who wants to shake up the passive arrangements of current societal issues; a woman who can, and perhaps needs to, bring about change, with her words, her mind and self-articulation.
Unlike Selma, whose body performs through verbalisation and action, Marina Marković exhibits her body as an object, alluding to the trans-generational captivation and oppression over women. In a subversive way, Marina offers her body for interpretation, objectification, territorial exploration of places of power. This work continues a series of performances that test the limits of the body as a mediator, an interface for inscription and projection. Similarly to “The Arrangement”, in which Marina’s skin becomes a canvas for institutional logotypes, at The Palace Marina receives a tattoo with textual references to the theme of the show. The duality of her performance comes from a play between offer and consent, two sentiments that surface in intervals, depending on whose role we take more seriously, the one of the artist, or of the institution. In this case, the institution is actually the system that demands and expects certain behaviours from people, from women, from the members of a society (or a palace). Through self-exploitation, or rather, offer and consent, Marina takes control over what she feels would happen to her anyway, which is losing and finding herself. At the same time, Marina is dealing with the feminised subject of the concubine as not only someone who offers their body in a sexual way, but also as someone who is in service, a subservient operant power behind the scenes, behind the flamboyance and the show. To illustrate this, her performance takes place behind a curtain, whereas the audience can see one segment of her skin on a projector, as they watch the livestream of the tattoo in the making: rule your body like a palace, treat your body like a palace, serve your body like a palace.⁴
Against both of these positions, the performance staged by Ivana Ivković is a dissociation from one’s own body and an inquiry into the mind, the concept, an idea materialised through another body. In keeping with her practice, Ivana delegates an act performed by a man, communicating in feminine first person speech (Serbian language is gendered). He is staged as if wearing a dress made out of people, like Leviathan: the agency of individual bodies that become a forceful unit of an abstract, bodiless power. Ivana, however, searches for a figurative representation of that power. Her king, or queen, is in transition between two genders and something else, but without any clear references to queer culture. This kind of power, the highest one, does not deal with gender or sexuality anymore. Rather, it seems to place itself almost ignorantly above such questions (precisely those questions that originate in the world order as we know it, in the patriarchy). Her protagonist is having a monolog in the distortion of the big room’s acoustics, moving as a collection of several bodies in sync. However, his speech, unlike Selma’s, expects no answer, but instead it takes pleasure in criticism, in intellectualised despair and in what seems to be a long-awaited understanding of his own crisis, hinting that final solutions to these crises can only be found in love. Allegorically, her protagonist seems to take after Selma’s Omer, but he could also be the representation of the matriarchy that never was; or perhaps even the matriarchy that is waiting to be, finally reaching its throne, with caution and trust issues.
If Selma’s performance works through the matters of the mind, and Marina’s of the body, we could say that Ivana opened up the questions of the spirit: the spirit of time, our time, and what we can do with it. Finally, there is one element that is missing in this Palace, which is only mentioned in fictional palaces, in fairytales, and that is someone “magical”: a witch, a warlock, a prophet, a “curator”, a doctor. This role has, perhaps, been left out on purpose, not for the sake of reality, but as the role that the noblewoman, the concubine and the queen want to give to the public. Let us not get trapped by the idea that it takes a supernatural force to make a change, because the role of the “magical” has not been not mystified. On the contrary: it is common, it is communal — it is ours.
¹ Bridgerton is the most watched Netflix show in English language, as of 2022. Source: https://deadline.com/2022/04/bridgerton- season-2-netflix-record-views-1235005908/
² At the time of writing this text, the world is going through a growing economic crisis, after more than two years of the global pandemic and four months into the war in Ukraine, among many other things.
³ This is a reference to another work by Selma Selman – You Have No Idea (2016).
⁴ Marina Marković stresses that these three sentences were made up collaboratively between her and the other two artists, where ruling and treating are words deliberately chosen by Ivana and Selma, respectively