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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 systems of domination. The work centers on the figure of a “living doormat,” transforming a familiar domestic object into a performative body subjected to acts of stepping, wiping, and pressure. Through a sequence of audience interactions—initially framed within a light, everyday, and subtly humorous situation—the performance gradually exposes deeper layers of discomfort, vulnerability, and complicity.

A key material element of the work is the Euro pallet, treated as a symbol of contemporary global capitalism and logistics. As a universal carrier of goods in global trade, the pallet points to the invisible infrastructures and labor systems that sustain the circulation of commodities. It evokes warehouse labor, delivery networks, and algorithmically managed workplaces, where workers often operate under precarious conditions while profits accumulate elsewhere. The pallet also references forms of invisible labor behind the development of artificial intelligence, including low-paid, anonymous work performed for large technology corporations.

The performance culminates in a physical and choreographic confrontation with the doormat and pallet, releasing accumulated tension through gesture and movement. Oscillating between humor and seriousness, the work uses familiarity and absurdity as strategies to disarm the audience before revealing the structural violence embedded in everyday gestures and economic systems.

Adaptable to various architectural contexts, Leave Your Worries at the Door transforms any site into a threshold—a zone of heightened attention—where relations of dominance and subordination are enacted and questioned. The performance opens space for reflection on empathy, boundaries, and the possibility of breaking free from destructive relational and systemic patterns.

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