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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 examining exploitation, power relations, and systems of domination. The work is built around a single central element: the doormat–pallet structure—a load-bearing construction composed of a Euro pallet with a large doormat attached, inhabited by the performer’s body. The structure functions as a threshold, a platform for audience interaction, and the main performative tool.

The Euro pallet refers to global trade and logistics, pointing to the largely invisible infrastructures and forms of labor that sustain the circulation of commodities. As a standard object of transport, it reflects how human bodies are treated as load-bearing and replaceable within economic systems shaped by long histories of extraction, forced labor, and control.

The performance translates these abstract systems into direct, embodied situations of choice and responsibility. To enter the performance space, viewers must cross the doormat–pallet structure, stepping onto it and transferring their weight onto the performer’s body beneath. This action creates immediate tension, confronting participants with questions of power, consent, and complicity. While greeted with familiar, even humorous doormat phrases, viewers must decide whether to step, hesitate, avoid, or withdraw.

Alongside this systemic frame, the work engages personal experience. Participants are invited to reflect on moments when they felt “like a doormat,” as well as moments when they caused others to feel this way. Small groups are then asked to step onto the structure and hold these reflections, while others remain around it.

Over approximately 30–40 minutes, the performance oscillates between humor and seriousness, allowing discomfort and ethical tension to emerge. It concludes with a physical sequence in which the performer lifts the structure from beneath and drops it onto the floor, releasing accumulated weight through sound and impact. Adaptable to various spaces, the work transforms any site into a threshold where personal decisions intersect with broader systems of power.