Barbara Kukovec, Katarina Stegnar, Urška Brodar
The Art of Living: The Act of Killing
Mladinsko Theatre, Rizoma Institute and City of Women
Crew
Video: Vid Hajnšek
Photo: Andrej Firm
Costume design and space design: Meta Grgurevič, Olja Grubić
Music and sound: Dead Tongues
Lighting design: Borut Bučinel
Stage property master: Tina Krajnc
Co-production: Mladinsko Theatre, Rizoma Institute and City of Women
Cast
Barbara Kukovec
Katarina Stegnar
Urška Brodar
About the performance
For the Performance Festival 2023, Barbara Kukovec and her collaborators prepared Sweet Worries, a collection of recipes that use legendary feminist performances as case studies to relearn reactions necessary for everyday survival. In her new project, Sister Barbara’s Cookbook, Kukovec will expand the recipes and share them with her fellow countrywomen. And then, right next to her home village, a femicide happened and sharpened the focus of the piece.
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You return to the countryside. You return to preach your gospel: art. With fire and sword, if necessary. You emancipate, feminise, depatriarchalize and educate women, hungry for contemporary performance. You include them in the artistic practice, build a community, confront the cluster of their principles and then … Then your community is shaken by an event that no artistic practice can digest. An event which makes you search for words, search for a way to face it. But it only exists as an erasure, death, non-existence. You get to work. You borrow a drone, hire a digger, grab a camera, pick up a shovel, prepare stakes, buy a climbing belt, create a puppet, prepare the terrain. You summon the women: allies, neighbours, relatives, high school students. You put on your trousers. You pick up your shovels. You stand in front of your houses. You lift up your slogans. You claim your positions. You wave your flags. This is what is in front of you. The decolonisation of the countryside.
The Art of Living: The Act of Killing by Barbara Kukovec, Urška Brodar and Katarina Stegnar is a direct, documentary piece that uses the language of art in its concentrated form, filled with references to the authors’ previous work as well as the creativity of women artists who were instrumental for the development of feminist performance art, to talk about violence against women, misogyny and patriarchy while questioning if art can change things. […W]e don’t leave the theatre the way we were when we entered.
Ana Lorger, aplavz!, 18 December 2025
While its form […] doesn’t offer classical completeness of either message or the ways it uses to express itself, it is genuine in its complexity, even though it reaches for the procedures of subversion, caricature and sarcasm […]. It is an intense testimony of the fact that in front of us, we have an attempt to stage the topic of extreme violence against women, femicide, which has cut into the creative process of the project about contemporary art in the periphery.
Maša Radi Buh, Sigledal, 22 October 2025
The performance does not focus on a single topic, rather addresses a range of issues that feminism deals with; from consensual sex and micro sexual violence to the femicide. […] Throughout these scenes, one feels the rage and sense of injustice radiating from the artists. Perhaps that is why this part feels so powerful and overshadows the rest of the performance, its honesty and rawness make the audience lose connection with earlier sections, as the core of the performance becomes the issue of femicide.
Karolina Bugajak, SEEstage, 17 October 2025
75 minutes, no interval
Video
Photo gallery
