Mazlum Nergiz: DRIFT

You continue to stare at the crucified body. "I tried to feel sorrow for this disappearance of a life but I realized I could only imagine to be in grief for somebody I didn’t know. I believe you can only mourn for something or somebody you love." You take me back to the bar. We drink a beer in silence. You say goodbye and go back downstairs. 

Home… it’s where I touched another body, longed for another body.
André Aciman
 

DRIFT is a wasteland of desire. DRIFT is an obsessive longing for existence. DRIFT is a wave that floods the space. DRIFT is a becoming of a body through writing. 

DRIFT is an environment in which the relation between loneliness and intimacy are being unfolded through a sensorial scenography of listening and writing. DRIFT performs absence as an experience. 

A nameless narrator takes us on a tour de force on sexuality, wandering, getting lost, and pain after smashing the architecture of control he constructed his life on. He relentlessly opens the wounds of his life. He reads and writes his body as an archeological wound in which every experience, every touch, every penetration lay on top of each other. 

A lucid journey begins and he takes us into ruins, abandoned buildings, night clubs — all spaces in which people meet to fuck, to look, to touch, to be with one another. How much risk can a life, a body bear? Why can no space contain the shame queer bodies have been taught to live with? Why does intimacy so quickly turn into violence? Which bodies are labelled ‘safe‘, ‘clean‘ and ‘non-contagious’? Which are rendered invisible? If cruising is a thermometer for health in the modern city, how can we think of the city as a body? What does it mean to touch and to be touched, especially in these times we are living in?

DRIFT invites to float in an oceanic space. The performed texts inform the space; the space is the floating boat for the text to be carried to the audience. A mutual meandering through listening, reading and feeling.

Writing & Concept: Mazlum Nergiz
Scenography: Larissa Kramarek
Performance: Pía Laborde-Noguez

More about Mazlum Nergiz

Photos by Thomas Lenden

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