Roomtone · Antonija · Durational performance (2-3 hours)
The following curatorial text for the performance was written by Juliana Arosemena, a student curator from the Braunschweig University of Arts (Germany), who participated in Lokomotiva’s Curating in Context Summer School during early September of 2026. During this edition of the Summer School, a group of artists and curators worked together to curate What We Inherit, What We Reimagine, a two-day performance festival hosted by lokomotiva at MKC in North Macedonia.
Migration takes courage, migration changes the soul and the body. It teaches you things about yourself you didn’t know you knew by making them inaccessible to you, by highlighting their absence. In the presence of difference, familiarity becomes an unreachable, nostalgic past. Migration is not always a choice, but when it is, this choice is a privilege.
As a person who has lived across many cities and multiple living spaces, Antonija’s work investigates how migration, social identity, and change influence (dis)embodiment, belonging, and the concept of home. Throughout that migratory journey, her relationship with the spaces was always different: some of those where places she didn’t want to leave, some never fully felt like a home, and others were even a necessary evil for her life’s development. In this performance, migrating between spaces changes Antonija’s body: the projections of her rooms act as a container for the body to fill—she allows these rooms to physically inhabit her. This exercise sews across the long fabric between her past history and present self, letting her intuition inform her movement during the performance, welcoming spontaneous emotion and reconnecting old memories with a present identity. During this attempt to re-embody these memories, Antonija explores physically how these places from her past make her feel and react today. The ringing bell throughout the performance indicates the shifting of the space; as Antonija’s experiment triggers memories, emotions, or even new interpretations, the artist’s decision to move onto another projection is spontaneous and subject to the moment—a dynamic that connects to the privilege of choosing to migrate and look for new beginnings, and acts as indicator for the intensity of her desire to stay or move on. Perhaps during this experiment, she may surprise herself when her embodied reactions subvert the expectations that have been informed by reminiscing and memory: she may get the chance to re-experience a space anew, to remember or find out new things through the eyes of now, or have her mind leave the physical space if the exercise brings her into a trance. In this performance we as spectators are witnesses of something deeply personal and intimate, Antonija’s work develops life on a self-contained petri dish that we watch from a distance. The performance is an open question: What is it like for the body to make space for the memories of all those homes and let them take over movement, breathing, and feeling?
Migrating can be lonely; every new place leaves a footprint on you, so that even if you return, the shape of your identity has changed permanently because of your journey. Where do you belong, when do you belong, and how do you belong?
When you move places, even within the same city, you always leave something behind; routine, comfort, language, memories, pieces of your identity—everything that provides the brain with the necessary means for homeostasis is suddenly not there anymore. It takes time for a new place to become your home, and often times this sentimental consolidation may never take place. How does your body know it feels at home? Do you feel the at home in your chest, your neck, your shoulders, your heart? What if, like in the case of Antonija, the place that is supposed to be your home actually never gives you that feeling? Antonija’s nomadic movement is a search for that feeling of belonging, an ongoing journey that she reflects upon here today.
Her main artistic medium is her body, and she describes being very in tune with it for as long as she can remember. Migration causes your psychophysical muscle memory to compete with the status quo of another environment; once your body attunes to the language of the new place, what used to be familiar is no longer fully part of your personal status quo—you are the sum of all the fragments you collect. This is why, despite her strong connection to her body, Antonija experiences visual memory in third-person perspective, creating a sense of disembodiment—a juxtaposition of personal, subjective feeling and with omnipresent distance.
As you witness the development of Roomtone Antonija’s body will re-migrate through the whirlwind of positive and negative emotions that come with upending the physical space we call home. With this performance, she embarks on an attempt to consolidate the duality between her first-person feelings and the third-person memory perception, the hypothesis of her experiment navigates the possibility of re-embodiment.
Интервјуто е дел од програмата „Колабораторија“ на Локомотива, посветена на истражување и продукција на уметнички, кураторски и теориски практики.