Performance
Dafni Krazoudi
28 October 2026
Performance
Dafni Krazoudi
28 October 2026
Q: You often speak about the body as a place where transformation takes place. What does the body know before the mind has had a chance to put it into words?
A: Valéry jokingly calls feelings and thoughts “inventions of the skin.” Meaning can emerge through the body without needing an explanation. The most intimate sensations are valuable precisely because they often remain indistinct: a resistance, a hesitation, or a magnetic pull. Trusting these inner forces to take shape without fully defining them is, for me, the power of the body.
Disaster, 2026
Q: At Berlin Art Week, you presented a video work that carries a sense of both beauty and discomfort. Is it important to you that the viewer feels slightly uneasy?
A: I’m interested in unease and the uncanny not so much when something is alienating or shocking, but when it feels strangely familiar. Provocation can be very reactive, while ambiguity allows openness and tension to coexist. The short film Disaster traces an experience that can neither be fully remembered nor reconstructed. It’s like sleepwalking through a forest. Suspended between recognition and disorientation, the viewer might want to wake up, or not.
Q: What happens to your body after a performance? Does anything of the character or the space remain with you?
A: I feel pretty empty after a performance for a few days even if I’m very satisfied with how everything went. The performance itself is such a peak of transformation and energy that afterwards there is naturally a period of recollection and coming back into myself. It also depends on whether the work is new or an earlier creation.
"When I create a piece and perform it for the first time, it often feels as though the work and I have become one through the process, so it is usually harder to detach from it afterwards."
Guilty, 2024
Disaster, 2026
Q: Berlin is both an incredibly free and a rather harsh city. Do you feel this contradiction reflected in your work?
A: Detaching from convention, social structures and expectations doesn’t automatically create meaningful freedom. It creates an open space that still needs to be transformed. Berlin reflects this constant process of deconstruction and reconstruction. Holding contradictory forces together is central to my work. Liberation, catharsis and transformation often come with loss, instability or sacrifice. GUILTY is a good example: the same pile of soil could be a grave or the foundation of something new.
Q: Is there a particular reaction from a viewer that could change the way you think about your own work?
A: Any response, reaction or shift from the audience is valuable to me. If I manage to move you even slightly from your original starting point, it means that something has passed between us. What feels much more estranging is when a performance ends and nothing has shifted at all. Two bodies sharing the same space, yet somehow remaining unreachable to one another.
Guilty, 2024
Q: What scares you most about your own work today?
A: The ephemerality of performance is what draws me in most, and sometimes what unsettles me. It’s there and the next second it’s gone. But that disappearance is not a loss. It is part of the work. A performance is such a complete unity of time, action and space: they begin, unfold and end together. Finality can be scary.
Q: Is there a part of yourself that you are still trying to understand through movement?
A: I think I’m trying to understand the relationship between the body and the idea of the self. The body is both the centre and the boundary of experience: you carry it, it carries you, it remembers and often reacts before thought takes over. There are moments when you see yourself in a photograph or mirror and, for a split second, recognise the image without fully identifying with it. Movement interests me because it can expose that gap, but also narrow it. It grounds consciousness; it is a return to the here and now.
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