Mp3 5’23”

Text in English: Olga and Yuri

June 2023

Vienna

The audio recordings were made on the occasion of a pacifist conference in Vienna, where Olga participated in person and Yuri logged in online, protesting against the Russian invasion and calling for early peace negotiations. Both are Slavic-speaking, pacifists and speak English for common understanding. However, both of them use English with the intonation of the Slavic language, and therefore the tone of what they say is a historical imprint of the global capitalist struggle for hegemony. For both of them, the Vienna meeting provided a safe space and a supportive environment for those few days. Their family names cannot be disclosed as both are in mortal danger.

Olga fled Belarus to another European country, where she still lives and works as a social worker. The reason for her escape is that she was declared a terrorist in Belarus in 2011 for feminist work, when she organized a public forum to make suggestions on how to spend public money. If she stays at home, she faces serious prison sentences, torture and fines, even today, if she returns home or is extradited from the country where she lives as a refugee. This is what happens to members of Lukashenko’s opposition, especially feminists.

In the first half of the sound montage, you can hear part of a charming conversation with her on the terrace of a Viennese restaurant. Olga speaks very simple truths, almost ethical truisms, and it is inconceivable to us that there is a country in Europe today where this world view could get you life imprisonment.

In the second half of the sound montage, we hear the Ukrainian Yuriy, who, because of his military obligations, has not been allowed to leave Ukraine since the Russian military invasion (February 2022). Yuriy is a pacifist, fighting against his will and his worldview as a conscript at the front, where he is forced to kill and could lose his life at any moment. Our conversation with Olga, about her role models and her past, with the noise of the city, in the background, has a very different atmosphere from Yuri’s speech, which was recorded on the loudspeaker in front of hundreds of people and edited to reflect the dynamics of the appeal for help.

Vienna as a refuge also appeared in Jolán Simon’s life. Between 1920 and 1926, when Lajos Kassák and Jolán Simon were forced to emigrate after the fall of the socialists’ revolution because of their political views, Jolán Simon shuttled between Budapest and Vienna, keeping their work alive and distributing their texts, which had been declared illegal. The shuttling between the two capitals in their historical situations, the forced hiding of their political values, but also the non-abandonment of political activism in the face of dictatorships, is an exciting period in Jolán Simon’s life’s work. Current parallels are heard in the English-language sound montage, based on actors from Belarus and Ukraine.

mp4 8’02” (excerpts from the 75-minute performance)

Text: excerpts from Elfriede Jelinek’s About Animals, translated by Zoltán Halasi
26 September 2019
Közkincs Könyvtár, Budapest

The neoliberal capitalist society fetishizing the free market presents sensuality of sex industry as trivial, normal and necessary. As good for both buyer and seller, carefully concealing the inherent structural disadvantages, poverty, social vulnerability, lack of opportunity and suffering of women prostitutes, as well as the deep misogyny and sexism that exists in society and manifests itself in many forms.

In prostitution, the dehumanisation, the alienation of the other, exist by the creation of a commercial situation. Its aim is that the female body is perceived by male consumers as an object inevitably necessary for raving, self-indulgent fun and cruelty, as a disposable consumer product, as a plaything, created by nature for sensual pleasure, like the vegetables, fruit and flowers available on the market, which they can obtain for money. It is through these commercial mechanisms that clients relieve themselves of the guilt that could be caused by using and hurting another person for  their own perverse pleasure-seeking. The essence of this perversion is the confusion of the experience of creation in sexuality with the experience of destruction in hurting, by the identification of death and birth.

Elfriede Jelinek’s On Animals points to these cruelties and the mechanisms that normalise dehumanisation. The text is based on intercepted telephone conversations of a prostitution trafficking company by the Viennese police, and the author has selected the documents to create her text.

Starting from the text translated into Hungarian by Zoltán Halasi, we set out to create a sound theatre performance that rhymes with Jelinek’s artistic vision, in which the phrase “fck fck” returns as a basso ostinato, among other things, through the repetition of words like the sound of a hurdy-gurdy instrument. The text contains details that evoke obscenity, banality or spiritual rituals. These are designed in accordance with our ideas of Dadaist alienation, conceptual versification, or Simon Jolán’s so-called recitations in glass voices. By means of rhythms, mechanical beats, fragments, repetitions, musical improvisations and imitations of liturgical voice-over, we have extracted logical meaning from the ordinary way of speaking and transposed it into a new realm of meaning. So it is sometimes a prayer for women who have suffered prostitution, sometimes an act for healing through women’s communities, sometimes a voice of unresolved trauma, sometimes a song of mourning, the mockery of the mechanism of purchase but most of all a protest song against the objectification of women. The tragicomic tone performed by the women evokes alternating emotions in the listener between compassion and ridicule. By this we have responded in a liberating way to the ambivalent tendencies and dehumanizing cruelty of the capitalist era when large numbers of Hungarian women living in poverty left the country and became workers in the porn industry, for lack of any better jobs.