Artists

Digging, circling, falling, repeating. In rumination, a body moves through recurring states whose rhythms and intensities continuously shift. The solo performance reacts to its site and audience. Its surroundings become part of the work, shaping how movement emerges and is perceived.

Taking rumination, the repetitive circling around thoughts and experiences, as its starting point, the performance explores the relationship between creativity, labour and productivity. Repetition becomes the physical trace of an everyday reality in which the pressure to remain active, visible and productive is increasingly internalised. Rather than constantly producing something new, David Dragan (no pronouns/they/them) begins to dig: both as a physical action and as a search for what has already accumulated within the body. Habits, expectations and gestures are excavated, repeated and transformed. The body thus becomes an archive of social demands and, at the same time, a site where these structures reach their limits.

The body appears in your work as a repository of memory. How can past experiences become inscribed in movement and physicality?
I am interested in how memories continue to live in the body, even when they can no longer be consciously recalled. Forgotten moments or intergenerational experiences can become inscribed in the smallest gestures. Trauma changes over time, almost like skin being shed, but it never disappears entirely. The body carries these traces with it and, for me, is therefore both fragile and resilient.
In my work, I try to capture those fleeting moments in which such traces become physically perceptible. Performance allows me to bring different layers of time together within the body. It also engages with mental health and queer existence, asking how experiences that may not be immediately visible can become physically perceptible through the small gesture or quiet movement.