THE UNPRODUCTIVE BODIES
PERFORMANCE TRILOGY
Through three stage performances, I return to the same central question:
what does a body do when the world asks too much of it?
The trilogy addresses neoliberalism not through discursive argumentation, but through the body itself — its fatigue, its refusals, its irreducible resistance to standardisation. Each piece approaches the cult of productivity from a different angle, offering a distinct form of resistance. But a shared research interest runs through all three works: how do we perceive the human body in relation to what surrounds it — and what do these relationships reveal about the way capitalist society organises itself?
These relationships are not incidental. They are structural. Capitalism does not merely exploit human labour: it also shapes the spaces bodies are allowed to occupy, determines which lives are considered productive, and extends its logic of extraction to both other living beings and technology. Our built environment — our cities, our infrastructures — is designed around the normative body; living beings are instrumentalised according to the same productivity imperatives that govern human workers; and technology is developed, above all, as a tool of optimisation and control. In each work of the trilogy, the non-human — architecture, animal, machine — enters the stage not as a metaphor, but as a mirror: reflecting back the structures that determine which bodies matter, and under what conditions.
A Performance is a Long Quiet River (2021)
Form of resistance: reclaiming boredom, accepting passivity as an active way of acting upon our environment.
Here, the non-human is the world built by humans — architecture, infrastructures, space — all designed for certain bodies and not others. Not all bodies move through the world with the same freedom, and the environment that surrounds us makes this inequality visible. Sometimes, doing nothing — simply existing in a space that was not designed for you — is the most controversial, most radical thing a body can do.
Suddenly, a Sloth Crosses the Street (2023)
Form of resistance: training in disobedience, drawing inspiration from the living world.
Here, the non-human is the animal world, More specifically, from animal training — through which we developed a choreography of obedience — placed in dialogue with the three-toed sloth, that magnificent creature for whom slowness is not a failing but a complete and sovereign way of being. On stage, the performers resist their own impulses, the entertainment industry's appetite for virtuosity and conformity, and the very idea that a body must be productive to have value.
My Freedom Is Your Distorted Gaze (2026)
Form of resistance: refusing to be optimised.
Here, the non-human are technologies — not as a neutral tool, but as a mirror that reflects back the standards against which bodies are measured and found lacking. The algorithm does not reflect a new societal point of view: it simply makes visible what was always there in our neoliberal and capitalist society : a demand for a body that performs, conforms, and never breaks down.