A live performance and exhibition project Performing Sites for Affective Clones by Marko Gutić Mižimakov in collaboration with Lana Hosni, Sonja Pregrad and Nika Pećarina, as well as clones Acurata2 & LanAcurataG8, Svetlana3 & Ona6, and MarQ8.1 will be held on April 13, at ARL starting at 9 p.m.

The project builds on the interaction between performers and their digital counterparts—kitschy animated figures named “affective clones.” As a way to look into togetherness, various aspects of artistic collaboration and production are processed through play among the performers, their clones, and the audience. The clones are approached as copies, replicas, surrogates, duplicates, and animated figures that simulate living organisms shaped according to how we wish to be seen by others. Yet as creations, they are not exhausted in an exhibition of attractive technological possibilities. Yet as creations, they are not exhausted in an exhibition of attractive technological possibilities. Instead, they address the reality of precarious labor conditions and fatigue. Through cultivating empathy, this ‘cloning’ transforms the need to duplicate ourselves in order to fulfill the requirements capitalism poses on our limited resources. The performance thus emerges through shared affective labor, as a dialogue between bodily gestures, movements, breathwork, and sound manifested by the performers and their quivering, digital embodiments materialized in projections and on flickering screens.

In earlier projects, the performer-clone choreography aimed at permeating the split between the tangible and the intangible. Following these experiences, this performance proposes a specific meditative duration consistent with the processes of creating and dissolving collectivity and negotiating cohabitation in the limited gallery space. The protagonists inscribe themselves in the institutional memory and symbolic status of the gallery through im/material and ephemeral gestures: looking and breathing, re/positioning, the interface of the skin, bodies in touch, pixels, lights, and sound and bodies in touch. The imaginary of these gestures within the institutional context addresses the current saturation with digital environments along with the depletion and loss of available spaces of sociability.

Establishing a social choreography Performing Sites for Affective Clones integrates the present moment through rituals of togetherness. By practicing collectivity through embodiment, the performances expand inhabitable interspaces—spaces where, for a while, we can be (with) others. There, we are able to slow down comradely in tenderness, with libidinal zest, and in mutual support in the face of loss and unavailability. As the artist points out, the affective labor at hand is “performative and not of ‘bare life’”; nevertheless, it is important, since every performance becomes a rehearsal in continuously probing the possibilities of creating simultaneously fictional, real, and indispensable communities, within and outside the white cube.