On October 12, 2023, on a street in Amsterdam a stranger pointed the muzzle of an invisible gun at my forehead and shot me.

“THE ADVENTURES OF DORA, WOLFIE AND THE INVISIBLE GUN”
is a looping investigation that takes invisible weapons seriously.

is an attempt to understand what happened to those who were killed with invisible bullets,

who are stuck in the video game,
who are stuck in the theatre,
who go on a (hero’s) journey

is an attempt to learn how to play first person shooter video games well

is a failure to learn
is a failure to understand
is a refusal to learn to understand
is catastrophic thinking that becomes

theatre
as an attempt to communicate
to communicate pain that is hard to heal deal with.

Hello, my name is Veronika and I work on the topic of violence, specifically on how patriarchal and militaristic violence is represented and materialized in everyday life. I explore the shadow of violence: how it can infiltrate every aspect of life, how we are forced to cope with it, the sadness and alienation it brings.

I grew up in a countryside village in Sweden in the mid-nineties, when the Social Democrats had started to dismantle the welfare system neoliberal style. A village that I now know shared some similarities with Édouard Louis' Hallencourt and Lucas Rijneveld's Nieuwendijk, and probably many others. Everyone in this village seemed to despise basically anyone and anything that was not from there, to the extent that Sosse (a Social Democrat) and 08:er (the phone area code for Stockholm) were standard in the arsenal of  popular slurs.

Anyhow, my parents were adamant that my siblings and I should not play with toys resembling weapons or wear camouflage prints, but we were told to turn the other cheek. Not a problem at the time, since I was not particularly interested in violence or the military anyway. But the boys around me played with plastic guns, rifles, and knives after school. They figured out who, how, and why to shoot and also how to defend themselves from getting shot.

With time, the plastic knives were replaced with butterfly knives, and the guns were upgraded to soft air guns or paintball rifles that older brothers provided them with. Their capital of violence grew as the plastic pellets and colourful paintballs desensitised them. Later on, some of them joined their fathers' hunting teams and would target practice on small animals and birds or on the outdoor shooting range close to my parents' house, which filled our weekends with the noise of endless rounds of ammunition being unloaded. Once, one of the rifles visited our high school principal’s office when a hunter dad aimed to increase his kid's grades, causing another kind of commotion.

It was around this time, the mid-2000s, that the boys had increased their capital enough to level up and unlock higher levels of the Pyramid of Hate (which spans from biased opinions to genocide) while simultaneously kicking others down the side of Maslow's Pyramid of Needs. This is the exact moment they figured out that their physical weapons could be left at home, since the gesture of pointing two fingers and saying pew pew was just as efficient—and even easier for their unarmed victims to internalise due to the surplus of trigger-happy teenage fingers.

I started becoming aware that I was queer by the storm of invisible bullets coming at me, and I became a firsthand witness to the fact that it takes a village to burn a witch. Lacking the skills of
stealthing and bashing back, I turned to the internet in search of community, where I came in contact with J and M: two anonymous profiles on a forum claiming they were around my age and from the same village. They are probably pedos, I thought, shaped by the nineties pedo-craze and the belief that I had never met a queer person before.

Turns out they were not. We had grown up together—apart.

In memory of J (1985–2014) & M (1987–2018)

Stockholm, 3 February 2025

PS. After the Örebro school shooting on 4 February, I need to state that events like these are part of the same scheme, usually performed by straight, white cis men who have also been alienated. Instead of turning the violence inwards, it usually takes form as revenge fuelled by resentment, white supremacy and a hyper-fascination with death. I have fantasised about revenge too, but was gendered differently and found community in the end. It is haunting that this shooting was carried out with a licensed hunting rifle. Violence is part of our culture, and everyone is a loser under patriarchy.

concept, text and direction by Veronika Abdul-Visocka 
performed by Veronika Abdul-Visocka, Aleksej Ovsiannikov, Chun Shing Au, Anton Visockis 
costumes by Džeina Lubāne 
video by Vlad Grigorov 
sound design by Anton Visockis 
performative set up in collaboration with Chun Shing Au 
dramaturgy in collaboration with Annika Hilger 
text editing in collaboration with Nicolas Lange 
сhoreographic advisor: Ainhoa Hernández Escudero
external advisors: Maria Rößler, Marijn Lems, and Patsy Lassbo
tutors: Samah Hijawi and Marta Keil 
special thanks to: tutors, staff and peers of DAS theatre as well as Soraya Reichl, SLB, Paraskeva Deikina, Sintija Šadurska, Q, Anna Konovalova, Kesha Bashinsky, Irene Brok, Andrea Božić, Julia Willms, Chris Keulemans, ID Lab, Peteris Viksna, Valeryia Le, Sojeong Lee and my mom. 

Special thanks for helping in bringing my collaborator from Riga to Amsterdam to Carolina, Krista, Lolita, Kitija, Amanda, Maija, Laima, Klinta, Gundega, Līva, Rebekah, and Baiba.

Made possible with a financial contribution from the ATD-Aart Janszen Fund.