The Knot

“If we prepare for war, we will get war.”

Something is tightening.

We all feel it.

And yet we keep pulling, each in our own direction, for as long as we still can.

Something is tightening.

In our stomachs. In our city. In our language.

Words like security, defence, preparedness, and resilience are becoming increasingly common. Yet behind these words, the image of a society once again organizing itself around the inevitability of war is coming ever more sharply into focus.

The Knot emerges from this feeling of tightening: from the unease that arises when preparing for war is presented as the only rational way of caring for the future, as Europe announces hundreds of billions of euros in military spending and states continue to increase their defence budgets.

The performance is woven from small, concrete situations in which large-scale political violence appears as something intimate, embodied, and already present. Here, militarization is not merely a matter of weapons and budgets, but a way in which fear, violence, and the loss of the future settle into everyday life.

Rijeka is a city where the histories of labour, industry, war, and broken promises have accumulated layer upon layer. What does it mean if the future once again begins to be built through military production? And what, if anything, can we still build from these ruins?

The performance draws on motifs from The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing and the article Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology by Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt, as well as excerpts from the film How a Ship Is Built (Kako se gradi brod, 1983), directed by Petar Trinajstić.