They can’t say anything
And they don’t
We can say anything
But we won’t
Instead of saying, she looked at me with caring determination
She licked her thumb and pressed it on my cheek wiping the stain I didn’t even notice was there
I thought it was icky, but felt like home
In this performance, I was reading some of the poems from the „Gastarbajter’s guide through poetic possibilities“ and drawing the map of Europe on the transparent foil placed on the overhead projector.
The performance tackles issues such as different modes of care, especially towards the repressive placement of borders. In the end, I was licking my thumb and erasing the borders (stains*) with my saliva until there was nothing left but the abstract shape and some words (voices) of the migrated workers.
*When I was younger, my grandmother would wipe the stain from my face the same way.
This work was performed during the SLARG Research Week in Antwerp and the launch of the TYPP magazine, in 2023.
Tijana Petrović 