Azra and Vuk’s performative practice operates at the unstable intersection of archive, body, and ideology. Their work navigates the afterlives of war, the sedimentation of generational trauma, and the invisible infrastructures of neoliberal governance that continue to shape the region’s social and affective realities. Refusing both moral simplification and aestheticization of suffering, they approach performance not as representation, but as a site of embodied research where testimony, historical documentation, and lived memory are compressed into a shared temporal experience.

This interview traces the methodological and ethical tensions that underpin their practice: What emerges is a sustained reflection on performance as micro-political intervention, an act that may not overturn systems, but can destabilize perception, activate memory, and accumulate subtle yet consequential shifts in collective imagination.

CC: In what ways do you consider performance to be an effective vehicle for political discourse and systemic critique, and what kinds of outcomes can performative actions generate in relation to political realities?

Vuk: Most of the time, political art and performance are not as effective as we would like them to be. That is really confusing for an artist. You can feel that art is not enough to challenge the system, and it often comes to a point where you have to decide whether you want to pursue art or activism. It is disappointing to see that you mostly affect people who already identify as progressive. This is one of the main challenges of political art in the Balkans. Of course, you are building space for more people to join the fight against imperialism, but the progress is very slow. In the Balkan context, if you only affirm one side and provoke the other, you create exactly what capitalism likes the most: polarization of the community. We fight each other over nationalism and human rights while capitalist corporations exploit “our” economy.

Maybe if we are loud enough about the imperial method of polarization itself, we can provoke everyone.

Azra: It feels complicit, in a way, to be doing political performance art while knowing that it is not doing much. I think it can challenge thinking a little or open space for communication, but if the audience consists only of people who already think similarly, the effect can become just another endless conversation about how awful the world is, followed by going back home and continuing our lives inside the system.

I think it is important for political performance to acknowledge that nowadays everything is political as an outcome. Whatever we see, feel, consume, or refuse to consume is a political act. Spreading awareness of this through art could be the first step toward change and toward creating space where we try to understand other views. If there is any possibility for us to act together and fight the system, we need community. And to have a community, we need to be ready to compromise and stand together, even when it does not feel good.

CC: In one of your most recent works, “M as Morinj” (2025), you engage with the history of the Morinj detention camp, a site of imprisonment and torture of civilian and military prisoners, active in the former Republic of Montenegro during the wars of Yugoslav dissolution. The camp, operative already prior to the official outbreak of the conflict, was only legally recognized as illegal and in violation of human rights in 2013. – How did this work reactivate and give voice to the testimonies of those directly and indirectly affected by the camp?

Vuk: This work was not an independent project, and it was challenging in various ways. The team of authors decided not to contact the victims directly, out of respect for their trauma and memory. Instead, they chose to work with testimonies documented in the official court transcripts.

Azra: This work was very challenging, as those who were directly and indirectly affected by the camp are still alive. Their wounds remain and they are wounds that can never fully disappear. Since this was a project developed by four authors, we shared the same position: not to aestheticize the events and emotions, and at the same time not to objectify or reduce the suffering to a moral slogan.

CC: How did you translate archival data, testimonies, and documentary materials into performative languages without neutralizing their political and affective charge?

Vuk: It was the use of spontaneous and clear bodily presence that the director saw as the most important method: to stay firm and empty, trying not to dramatize anything, which was a smart choice. It is very easy to fall into the fetishization of emotion when using someone else’s archives, especially with such sensitive topics.

We, as actors, were used as tools, and that was a major challenge: not to impose ourselves on a story that is bigger than us.

Azra: The fact that this war was one of the dirtiest wars in recent history, as it was not a war between armies but between civilians who acted on their own and absurdly spoke the same language, guided us in choosing the style and the way to tell the story.

This region is too polarized for an artist to simply choose a side. Being complicit in those polarized relations only means continuing the status quo. We know that before people started shooting at each other, culture and art, especially poetry, were used to create those polarities.

As I said in a previous answer, our stance was to compress the reality and all its sides into a one-and-a-half-hour performance in which we did not take on specific roles. We were simply four artists summarizing archives through our voices and bodies, without trying to take sides or reduce everything to statements like “War is bad” or “Concentration camps should not exist.”

Both war and art are part of the machinery we live in, and being against it means being against the turbo-capitalist, imperialist patriarchy we inhabit. It is not separable.

CC: More broadly, what kind of projectual and methodological structure guided the process from archival research to performative realization? What transformations occurred in the passage from testimonies, documents, and recordings to a physical-performative work conceived as a tool for public memory?

Vuk: The director sat us down and told us to create a circle out of chairs. We all brought our testimonies about the fall of Yugoslavia. After sharing personal and inherited traumas, we slowly started building the trust needed to approach this topic very gently.

We worked day and night to build an archive that would explain the forgotten horrors. We worked within a horizontal hierarchy, meaning we all contributed to the text of the play.

Azra: Throughout the project, we were almost inseparable. We had scheduled rehearsals, but before and after them we would gather to read together, watch documentaries, and hold talks and interviews with historians, locals, and activists. After that, we had improvisation rehearsals and something close to group therapy sessions, where we continuously reproduced, spoke about, and performed the material we encountered in our research. The 600-page trial document, our notebooks, books, and theoretical texts naturally became part of the performance that we carried within ourselves.

There was nothing extraordinary in the approach. The aim was, at any moment, to remain as clean as any other human being, not to react impulsively and not to condemn. Through the research, we learned that anyone, at any moment, can occupy any of those roles, either victim or persecutor. Every day, we move in and out of those positions.

CC: In “Aj lav ju Drazenka” (2025), you investigate war as an active and unresolved legacy, a historical force capable of reverberating across generations through generational trauma and its inscription within the body. The work addresses trauma, mourning, and violence from a transhistorical perspective, engaging with themes of neocapitalism, bodily endurance, and the redefinition of the normative category of the human through the lens of “grievable lives”. Death emerges here not as an endpoint, but as a process through which a national historical wound is continuously negotiated. – How did this work originate, and which theoretical frameworks informed its development?

Vuk: This work originated from the intimate archives I had been collecting about my family. It is still in development, and for me it is the most important piece we are currently working on. It is full of ethical considerations and questions of intimacy and voyeurism. My mother gave me her diary from the 1990s, and it turned out to be what I had presumed: a testimony of one family’s doom through the lens of war, diagnosed post-trauma, as well as the processes of privatization and poverty.

This work is deeply connected to the legacy of Yugoslavia’s anti-imperialism. In the 1980s, Yugoslavia was pressured to change its economic structure, which contributed to the wars of the 1990s. During our research, we confirmed what now seems obvious: Friedman’s neoliberalism was imposed onto the firm structure of the Third Path socialist republic of Yugoslavia, dismantling it entirely. What we are living now in the Balkans can be described as post-utopian – even post-apocalyptic – times. We realized that in order to research my family, we also had to research the Third Path, developmentalism, the Non-Aligned Movement, anarchism, anti-capitalism, and other interconnected frameworks.

Azra: For us, it is very important to point out, through our work, the multiple ways – vertically, horizontally, across political spectrums and across time – in which systems affect our lives and emotions, and how huge traumatic events such as war can mark someone’s life and the lives of those around them, contributing to intergenerational trauma.

In this sense, Vuk’s mother’s diary became the body of the work, together with a historical and sociological analysis of the fall of Yugoslavia. It was crucial for us to read authors from the Balkans, such as Boris Buden, Rastko Močnik, and Dubravka Ugrešić, as well as thinkers from the Global South and from countries that experienced similar destinies to Yugoslavia – whether through so-called “peaceful interventions” by the West or through instrumentalized civil wars.

It was important for us to identify connections we share with Cubans, Iraqis, Iranians, or Argentinians. The process was both devastating and beautiful at the same time: devastating to realize how many people have suffered, are suffering, and will continue to suffer due to globalization and neo-imperialism; and beautiful in the sense of not feeling alone – in recognizing that there might still be a possibility to reconnect and to continue the path that was once interrupted.

CC: In “Rhythm Exhausted Pipe/Marriage”, marriage is reread as a political and social dispositif, functioning as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion within civil rights regimes. The work critiques bureaucratic, administrative, and institutional systems that regulate intimacy and legitimacy, presenting normative bonds as prerequisites for rights equity. Developed within a gallery space, the work also articulates a pointed critique of art institutions themselves. – Do you consider the art system and institutional galleries to be complicit within a broader capitalist apparatus?

Azra/Vuk: Of course they are. It is the perfect art-washing scheme that many artists fall for. That is why it is important to stay informed about grants and galleries that impose their own agendas and outreach strategies on artistic presentations. In this context, I would say that guerrilla artists are the ones who can truly challenge institutions and create more space for other artists, especially in a place like Montenegro.

There are many examples. In 2020, the oil company INA signed contracts with the Art Museum in Zagreb. Or consider banks that sponsor art events, while this practice is completely disconnected from, and often contradicted by, their internal work policies.

Stephen Pritchard speaks about how artists contribute to the privatization of working-class communities that are considered poor and underdeveloped. They open private art hubs and present them as regenerative investments for the community. In reality, they often reshape urban space, raise housing costs, and deepen class divisions.

CC: How does your performative practice position itself within the contemporary art system in light of this critique?

Azra/Vuk: We are only at the beginning of discovering this fraudulent scheme that directly targets almost every artist. Right now, we are trying to be very careful about who we work with, especially considering that many theaters and galleries are complicit in different ways.

It is challenging for an artist to say no to funding that can be crucial for producing work. But then you have to ask yourself how you are going to subvert that very structure within your work. Otherwise, you risk merely resembling anti-capitalist ideas that are financed by the state or private sector.

There is always a danger of becoming decorative critique of being tolerated because your opposition is contained within the institution that hosts you. That is why constant self-questioning is necessary. Who benefits from this collaboration? Who gains visibility, legitimacy, or profit?

We are trying to understand how to operate inside systems without being fully absorbed by them. Sometimes that means negotiating carefully. Sometimes it means refusing. And sometimes it means using the given platform to expose the contradictions that made the platform possible in the first place.

CC: Across works such as “The Fallen Little Man” and “The Clown Is Present”, a more theatrical and expressionist dimension emerges. – How do you integrate theatre, improvisation, and Butoh dance techniques into your performative practice, and how do these languages function as tools of political and affective articulation?

Azra/Vuk: We don’t treat theatre, improvisation, and Butoh as separate techniques. They melt into each other within the same body.

Theatre gives us a frame. It builds tension, structure, and situations. It allows us to expose power dynamics in a clear way, who obeys, who commands, who breaks. It provides the skeleton of the work.

Improvisation keeps that skeleton from becoming rigid or lifeless. It is something we will always use. It keeps the performance risky and alive. It allows us to react in the moment, to follow instinct, to fail, to interrupt ourselves. Politically, improvisation feels like a child playing with something serious. It is raw. It is direct. It does not ask for permission. Sometimes it is the most honest way to say fuck off without turning it into a slogan.

Butoh goes deeper. It reaches the audience emotionally and physically before anything is intellectually understood. It slows everything down. It makes the body heavy with memory. It can provoke discomfort without offering explanation. The body begins to appear as if it is carrying history, trauma, silence. It is not about beauty. It is about exposure.

And then there is clowning. Clowns tear you apart while you laugh. You are laughing and suddenly you realize you should be crying. Or you feel anger. Or shame. It disarms you first and then opens the wound. That shift is political for us. It reveals how easily we accept absurdity until it becomes unbearable.

CC: Considering your overall research as an activist and deeply political practice, in what ways can performative action operate as an effective mode of political critique rather than symbolic representation alone? Performative action, in our understanding, does not function as a symbolic substitute for politics. It operates as a micro-political intervention within lived reality.

Azra/Vuk: We do not measure effectiveness through institutional visibility or immediate structural change. The most tangible indicators of our work are micro-results, subtle but real shifts in perception, emotional destabilization, intellectual friction, and moments of recognition. When someone leaves a performance unsettled, humming a phrase, replaying an image, questioning a narrative they previously took for granted, that is already political work in motion.

Performative action becomes effective when it bypasses purely rational discourse and engages the body, affect, and memory. Political critique, in this sense, is not delivered as an argument but as an embodied experience. It moves through voice, rhythm, repetition, and fragmentation. It operates in the nervous system before it solidifies into opinion.

In that sense, performative action exceeds symbolic representation. It produces affective residues. It plants questions rather than slogans. While these effects may appear small, they accumulate. Political transformation rarely begins with grand gestures. It begins with subtle shifts in how people feel, remember, and imagine.

CC: Throughout the complexity of your work, recurring themes include the transmission of subjective and collective memory, particularly in relation to war, mourning, bodily resistance, and the use of voice as a medium of historical awareness. Concepts such as necrocapitalism, collective memory, generational trauma, and the critique of bureaucratic and institutional practices as mechanisms of normalization and social control form the theoretical backbone of your research. This practice is sustained by the active participation of others and by the articulation of the self as a corporeal archive and vehicle of memory. Engaging with these theoretical axes, what future trajectories do you envision for your work, and what outcomes have emerged from your research so far?

Azra/Vuk: Considering art as an expression of attitude and research, we think guerrilla performance is a possible future method we want to explore in Montenegro. Creating strong online outreach is also a crucial step for the art scene here. In that way, both locally and digitally, we want to establish a presence and invest in performances that speak about the absurdity of our lives.

Maybe if we are loud enough, we can fully embrace our pessimism. Why should we be optimistic artists? Perhaps we need to be angry and loud.

Future work within our practice increasingly moves toward fiction grounded in documentary material and political realities. We are interested in constructing speculative dramaturgies that emerge from archives, testimonies, ideological texts, and historical fractures, while refusing straightforward representation. In the project we are currently developing, titled Post Woyzeck, this shift becomes explicit. The work departs from Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, yet it does not aim to reinterpret it in a classical sense. Instead, it imagines a divergence. The soldier does not kill his wife. He makes a wrong turn.

About Azra and Vuk

Azra  (Bijelo Polje, 1998) and Vuk (Cetinje, 2000) form an artistic duo working across performance, theater, and intermedia arts. Both are currently pursuing master’s degrees in Intermedial Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje.

Vuk studied Visual Arts at Mediteran University, graduating in 2023 after a one-year detour into theater directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Cetinje. His practice bridges visual arts and performance. As an Erasmus+ student in 2024, he studied at UAD in Cluj-Napoca, where he collaborated with Magic Puppet Theatre, performed at the Cluj Days Festival, and developed works at Casa Transit. He received a scholarship for the Salzburg Summer Academy in 2024, attending the course Dancing in Tongues led by the Palestinian-Israeli artist group System Ali.

Azra is a visual and performance artist from Montenegro. Her practice intertwines performance, video, voice, body work, and documentary archives, exploring the legacy of war, and the position of ordinary people within contemporary social structures. Since 2023, she has been working in an artistic duo with Vuk. SIn 2025, the duo was invited as authors, directors, and performers of the piece” l love you Draženka’’ at the 18th International Theater festival in Tangier, FITUT 2025.

Political Bodies, Historical Pain:
Azra and Vuk’s Intermedial Approach to Performative Legacies
Interview by Chiara Causo