User Manual · Martina Danilovska · Performance 20 minutes

 

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.

When you don’t have hope in medicine, what else can you do? Unlearn to put western medicine on a pedestal of truth?

I am a mother of…

Being a woman diagnosed with infertility, chronic illness, an autoimmune disorder, or an understudied syndrome is a fight between hopelessness and intuition. Western medicine misidentifies cause and effect in women’s bodies with alarming confidence; it seems as if it didn’t matter what you know you feel; the authority about what is a legitimate sensation does not rest on your shoulders. A diagnosis is often a door shut tight: you come to consult for answers and solutions but are left sitting in the limbo of a waiting room where nobody will ever call your name up next. All the while there is a motherly instinct within you to have a child that has never been more present, pressuring from both, the inside and the outside to heed its own call.

I am a mother of…

Infertility tastes like shame. Is it possible we have misplaced this shame on the wrong body? Who is actually at fault when we lack the education to fully understand the necessities of women’s bodies?

Do you remember your roots, do you remember the stories of previous generations?

In Упатство за употреба (Packet Leaflet), Martina introduces us to the stories of others who have struggled with infertility or partaken in Macedonian rituals that relate to that purpose. As she begins the performance, the smell of incense fills the room and creates a prelude for what is to come, you may feel invited to image that you’ve crossed a threshold into a more sacred space, welcome to the circle. You see flashes of men and women weaving swings out of rope together, singing and swinging as a group. The sight of revered, sacred rocks will meet your eyes, you may recognize them as Govedar Kamen and Konopishki Cucki. You may see children at play, grateful new parents coming back to a sacred cite to complete a promise they made to the land. A cup of milk is handed to you by the master of this ceremony—drink together, you are now connected to your body, your instinct, to each other, to the room, and to the stories. Assisted by practices and sensory aids customary to different rituals, Martina initiates one of her own with this performance. This is a ritual that invokes the memory of local ancestors: Macedonian bodies that once journeyed through push and pull of motherly instinct: infertility, stigma, hopelessness, tradition, childbirth, and gratitude. It may be her voice guiding us through the story of each memory, but there are many names using her tongue to fill the room; who is really speaking, who is really commanding the ritual?

I am a mother of…

Martina is here, but so are many other mothers. Like many rituals and legends, hers rides the line between occult and something else; the ties to our ancestors and their bodies can reassure us that intuition is our sixth sense, this land has history, power, and a future. Whose traditions do we practice, and where do they come from? My mother is not my only mother.

I am a mother of…

With this performance, Martina explores the emergent manifestations of a latent motherly instinct of feeling the pressure to have a child. Whether it’s blocked by infertility or bad timing, her storytelling follows the “unconventional” ways through which women may channel that instinct: some of us become the mothers of our friends, of our siblings, our partners, other relatives, our stuffed animals, strangers, and at some point, we even become the mother of our parents. Using the title “Упатство за употреба (user manual)” Martina highlights an irony that accompanies western medicinal treatments: the ridiculous length of the instruction leaflet that comes with any pill, ointment, fluid, or preparate expands a plethora of possible side effects, complications, warnings, and contradictions—the solution to your afflictions has an overwhelming amount of if’s and but’s. The idea is not to question the legitimacy of these treatments, but rather to question their legitimacy as the default way to approach treatment. Martina’s performance therefore invites us to raise questions about the entanglement between instinct, medicine, tradition, ancestral knowledge, lack of education on women’s bodies, and the stigma of (in)fertility approached through a fascination for local Macedonian legends concerning these issues. Additionally, the ritual poses questions about women’s “duty” to become mothers: a pressure women feel internally and systemically. Martina raises the possibility of understanding these motherly roles within the dynamics of our unmistakably non-motherly relationships—roles that nowadays seem to be the norm—as unusual: “it makes us go beyond the reasonable mind just to fulfill the duty of being a mother.”

With the help of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Martina’s performance is informed by the research she’s conducted across the institute’s videos, interview footage, and archive records. Invaded by the curiosity and fascination of confronting her motherly instinct, the intuition deep within her body has led the charge for this idea the moment she became interested in the rock formations. It has been a compact yet emotional journey through a small portion of the history of her country, the history of her body, and the body we share through ancestry, ritual, instinct, and identity. With the spark of obsession and disbelief behind her eye, she infects you with fascination for these structures deep in the Macedonian mountains, the passion of her curiosity is laced with a crucially inquisitive tone; what are these figures, why do I feel so attached to them? Is this my body or my ancestor’s body? Why do I feel pressure to become a mother to you, to them, to us?

Интервјуто е дел од програмата „Колабораторија“ на Локомотива, посветена на истражување и продукција на уметнички, кураторски и теориски практики.