JEDEM DAS SEINE

“Violence accumulates in bodies and it is impossible to erase. It is still in there,” says a ten-year-old girl in the performance. An older woman adds: “Even the victim cannot believe in what happened to her, because it is so unbelievable that she becomes impossible to herself.”

Fascisms and nationalisms which are being resurrected in EUROPE and all over the world are instrumentalizing the bodies of women and children again, and using them in a political war. Total supervision over the female body is the foundation of every nationalist populism.

Today, radical right-wing political formations are built around slogans of defending women. These are our women, and their bodies need to be protected from barbaric hordes. From OTHERS. Ultimately, women and children today are the most effective ideological weapon.

Since the beginning of capital accumulation, the body of a woman has been a brutally colonized resource. Women’s work – the reproduction of the labour force – became key to the development of capitalism, and women experienced a stronger alienation from their bodies, from their “work,” than what was ever felt by any workers. The cogs of capitalism and nationalism interlock and clench over the female body.

Nothing demonstrates this better than the history of the exploitation of women through sexual slavery in Nazi Germany, which is still repressed in the collective consciousness. In labour camps and concentration camps, sex with sex workers at camp brothels was the most elaborate form of motivating prisoners to better productivity. This kind of violence was never brought to light, it was never redressed. Women as a COST were forever erased from the collective memory on the Nazi death industry. Has anything changed since the times of DACHAU?

Marta Górnicka:
“In MANIFEST, I look at the body as a place where fascism keeps regenerating. I bring on stage the monstrous figure of Donald Trump as an obscene embodiment of the alliance of capital, misogyny and the limitless contempt for otherness defined as weakness. In times of #metoo, protests in the United States, and demonstrations by women which roll through the world, the CHORUS can be nothing but a revolutionary act and a song of rage – that is why I mix the computer machine of the chorus with pop culture, feminist manifestos, and a Bach cantata; I expose the rape and violence of language, and blend it with love songs, making a song in honour of the END OF MAN and the impossible rebellion: JEDEM DAS SEINE. In the song, I also ask: who are we and is justice possible in the face of the END, the END of all formulas and utopias? JEDEM DAS SEINE, the universal ancient formula of justice, displayed by the Nazis at the gate of a concentration camp.

My performance is an answer to the need for a scandalous feminism which does not shun even the most horrifying, monstrous aspects of humanity.
In JDS, I refer to the system of sexual slave labour in Nazi Germany. Little is still known about these women, and although it was perhaps the worst form of slavery, they live in disgrace as supposed collaborators. After the war, they were refused redress. Such absurdity is only possible within patriarchy, where the objectification of women has no end, it replicates again and again anew! But for me, it is also a monstrous metaphor of what the female body is to capitalism. Of how it serves to multiply capital, increase inventory, produce resources which will make possible even greater accumulation and infinite conquest”