Six Verbs Movement

A collective somatic research that engaged six fundamental actions to explore embodied experience and political memory.

Rather than producing a single consolidated “work,” the project unfolded as a shifting field of site-responsive actions, installations, and sonic interventions. Curated by Yael Vishnizki Levi and Simona Kasprowicz (with production by Kasprowicz), it operated like a living laboratory: temporary propositions that appeared, dissolved, and left traces—altered attention, residual objects, bodily afterimages. The emphasis stayed on process over closure. Instead of smoothing the city into a coherent narrative, Six Verbs Movement held friction: between what is visible and what is suppressed, between public space and private grief, between vulnerability and the capacity to claim ground.

Lublin becomes a palimpsest here: repeatedly overwritten by dominant narratives, yet still carrying imprints of those displaced or silenced. The project treats space as historically charged material, and the body as the instrument that registers that charge. A step becomes an annotation. A pause becomes a claim. A posture becomes a way of holding presence in places trained to forget. “Movement” names not only choreography, but political inhabitation—how bodies appear, withdraw, persist, and are made to disappear.

The realizations approached this score through distinct modes—testimony, object economies, music as transmission, constructed environments, and listening as method. How’s the Beast? (dir. Eyal Weiser) wove Polish and Israeli registers of memory and post-trauma through fragmented storytelling, pressing on the ethics and costs of “reconciliation.” SYMBOL gotowe / lying (Ulrike Grossarth) intervened in abandoned commercial spaces, shifting discarded objects into unstable symbols and quietly undoing logics of value. Żywizna (Raphael Rogiński) braided Yiddish lullabies with Kurpie folk songs in non-traditional venues, treating resonance—breath, vibration—as a carrier of cultural persistence. Memento Mori (Robert Kuśmirowski) built an immersive environment of relic-like simulacra and fabricated ruins, suspending time and complicating what counts as “authentic” remembrance. Breathing Mountain (Magda Franczak and Ludomir Franczak) worked at the edge of audibility, turning listening into an ethics of attending to absence—especially the erased traces of Lublin’s Jewish community.

Across the project, the body’s verbs are treated as already politicized. Walking reads as reclamation; standing as assertion; sitting as witness; lying as remembering; sleeping as resistance; dying as inscription. By insisting on micro-gestures and temporary presence, Six Verbs Movement avoids monumentality and keeps memory unstable—something activated and renegotiated each time a body moves through the city differently.

Realized in collaboration with Towarzystwo Edukacji Kulturalnej and Centrum Kultury w Lublinie, the project was supported by POLIN Museum, the Marshal of Lubelskie Voivodeship, and the Mayor of Lublin.