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LEAVE YOUR WORRIES AT THE DOOR
performance with spoken word, duration: 30 min
2024.10 Apartment (Mieszkanie) exhibition, curated by Wojciech Gilewicz, Other Society Gallery (Inne Towarzystwo), Warsaw, Poland

"Leave Your Worries at the Door" is a performance addressing themes of exploitation, power dynamics, and psychological and social games of domination. In this piece, I take on the role of a doormat—a mundane object found at the threshold of nearly every home. This time, the threshold was part of the exhibition "Apartment", organized by the Other Society (Inne Towarzystwo) art collective in a private apartment.

As audience members entered the space, they wiped their shoes on me, the "living doormat." Later, in the living room, they were invited to step onto me and recall moments when they felt exploited or made someone else feel like a "doormat." The performance culminated in a dance with the doormat-palette, which served as an attempt to process difficult emotions and memories. The built-up tension was released in a symbolic act of throwing the doormat to the floor and letting it hit the hard surface—a gesture of liberation from heavy emotions and past experiences.

The performance combined elements of introspection, ritual, and shared experience. The private apartment space, typically a place of comfort and refuge, was transformed into an arena for reflecting on interpersonal relationships and social structures where roles of dominance and subordination are continuously enacted. Ultimately, the piece created space for dialogue about empathy, boundaries, and breaking free from destructive patterns.

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