Veronika Abdul-Visocka
- Opleiding
- DAS Theatre
- Lichting
- 2025
My name is Veronika. I practice auto-ethnographic writing, dramaturgy, performance, theater and community art.
Currently, I watch cartoons and I am learning to play video games.
It’s difficult for me to find the right words in the frame of describing myself and my practice, because attempting to do this puts me before a deliberately false choice. I cannot formalize my experience linearly, choose a voice and name to personify myself.
Description attempt: I was born in 1997 in Eastern Europe, in Latvia. My mother is of Polish-Belarusian origin, and my father is a Lezgin from Dagestan. There are three forgotten languages and three religions in our family. When people ask me about my origin, it’s always difficult for me to answer, I joke and say that I don’t know - I’m a hybrid. I was born on the ruins of a dead artificial empire. My parents weren't supposed to meet.
I think I've reached a dead end - My name is Veronika and I love cartoons and I am learning to play video games.
It is impossible to think about my practice in isolation from the system of choices that led me to it. After graduating from school, I went for a russian academic theater education and in the process came face to face with the state, the vertical of powers, academic violence and the matrices of russian politics. Feeling the impossibility to exist in the frame of dramatic theater / theater of the empire, rooted in the russian political system, I went into the underground scene.
I worked with neurodivergent artists in the independent theater company “Apartment. conversations.”
I produced an auto-ethnographic performance in the bowl of a former soviet swimming pool under a Lutheran church (Sankt-Petri-Kirche).
I explore voids and abysses. If I imagine reality as a single fabric, then I travel through its cracks and breaks and explore these gaps through games. Where is the best place to play games?
My name is Veronika, now I live in Amsterdam, study at DAS and perform in “Within Cells Interlinked” by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms (TILT).
I'm learning to play video games and I'm researching memories that contain violence.
I'm at the dead end again and every time that I get stuck, I say to myself. My name is Veronika. I watch cartoons and I am learning to play video games.