In late August 2025 I travelled to Ljubljana, Slovenia to take part in PARL 2025 — Performance Art Research Ljubljana (22–31 August). My participation was supported by a UAL Postgraduate Research Grant bursary.

I arrived with a simple question: what happens when a body stays with a force that is barely visible, but constantly present?

At PARL I developed and shared a solo performance installation titled Breeze (work-in-progress) — a 25-minute, music-free work where four fans generate a continuous, gentle wind. The set-up creates an atmosphere that is both tender and demanding: the air caresses, pushes, interrupts, and insists.

What I worked on during the residency

PARL offered a rare situation: time, studio space, and an international group of artists to test ideas without rushing toward a finished product. My focus throughout the residency was to listen to small shifts — changes in pressure, attention, balance, and micro-decision.

The work centred on:

• A spatial score: positioning four fans to make wind an active partner rather than a background effect.

• Endurance and subtlety: staying with the smallest changes in weight, skin, breath, and texture.

• An ethics of attention: letting the performance be shaped by what appears rather than what I plan in advance.

• Testing presence in a shared space: how the audience’s proximity and movement alters my choices, and how my own stillness alters theirs.

  
  

Breeze as an installation (not just a choreography)

I think of Breeze as a performance-installation because the work is not only in my body. The wind builds a field in the room. It creates a shifting architecture of sensation.

In the showing, the audience entered the space while I was already there, already working. There was no “start” moment to announce itself. People stood in a semi-circle and could move around me, sensing the work from different angles.

Technically, I kept the set-up minimal. I asked for an empty black-box space and simple space lighting, so the audience could feel the atmosphere of the room without theatrical framing.

A note on my research context

Breeze sits inside my current practice-as-research PhD at University of the Arts London, where I explore minor gestures a mode of appearance within neurodivergent-informed performance practice. 

For me, “minor gesture” is not about doing less. It is about valuing what is usually overlooked:

• the almost-unnoticeable correction

• the moment attention slips

• the way a texture redirects a choice

• the quiet pressure that reorganises the whole body

At PARL, the wind became a practical way to stay close to that scale of perception.

What I’m taking forward

Residencies often produce a list of outcomes. PARL gave me something slightly different: a clearer sense of what I can trust in the work.

I’m leaving PARL 2025 with:

• A stronger performance score for Breeze and a clearer understanding of its timing, pacing, and thresholds.

• A felt experience of how a simple material set-up can generate complexity without adding narrative or decoration.

• New questions about the audience’s role in an installation: how much to invite movement, and how much to protect the quiet intensity of the space.

  
  

During the residency, PARL’s daily feedback team included:

Jurij Konjar

Kristina Aleksova

Rok Vevar 

and more...