THE INTIMACY OF OTHERNESS: How to Live a Life … (2025)
A work that unearths, holds, and pulses with a vital question: "How to live a life worthy of the breath we share?"
The Intimacy of Otherness is a durational transmedia multisensory performance lecture by and with Jatun Risba, exploring their radical self-healing from multiple sclerosis (2012-2019) through guerrilla art interventions, dances of urgency and the use of various bliss-inducing techniques. These practices included clubbing, (self-)hypnosis and erotic expression. In the first act of the work, the artist shares their lived experience while lying in stillness on vertical tree logs. By echoing their seminal performance Be-coming Tree, the artist embodies and unveils qualities that need to be cultivated in order to transform the seemingly “impossible” (healing, etc.) into an “I’m possible” reality.
Developed over three years (2023–2025), the artwork unfolds in three acts, each conceived annually as a deepening stage of the journey. The third and final act, How to Live a Life..., emerged from Risba’s artistic research during the Peripheral Visions residency with the association IoDeposito, in the context of Nova Gorica–Gorizia 2025 European Capital of Culture. It premiered in June 2025 in an air-raid shelter in Udine, Italy, providing a resonant historical backdrop for the work. This closing chapter responds to the historical and contemporary challenges—relational, human, and ecological—of inhabiting a cross-border territory, offering a poetic, embodied, live-spoken response to the complexities of identity, belonging, and interdependence.
A wooden scenography, The Spiral of Life, crafted by the Italian design and furniture company New Life Contract in dialogue with Risba, interacts with the artist during the performance. In a continuous cycle of composition and decomposition, each gesture contributes to the building of a collective ground, where every part is entangled in a sensitive whole and every deviation becomes regenerative. Every fissure is a breath, a glimmer of light—and so on, into infinity.
The production of How to Live a Life... was financed by the European Union as part of the Small Project Fund GO! 2025 of the Interreg VI-A Italy–Slovenia 2021–2027 Programme, managed by the EGTC GO. With gratitude to Franco G. Livera for the photo and video documentation of the work.
Revisit the earlier acts of The Intimacy of Otherness through this link.