Do not crown us with legends, 2026

The performance begins with a body carrying a belt wound around itself, holding within it the names, dates, and voices of the dead. Slowly unwinding, the performer encircles a territory, tracing a boundary between this world and another. This gesture draws on a Belarusian ritual tradition in which sacred places were honored and protected through encircling: groves, roadside crosses, stones. Here it becomes a final act of transition that never took place for the victims of Kurapaty, a site of mass Soviet executions during the 1930s–1940s, whose memory was systematically suppressed and denied.

The belt, the central art object of the work, carries embroidered fragments from archival materials: quotes, significant dates, numbers, symbolic images, lines by executed poets. Its fragmented testimonies mirror the fragmentation of Belarusian historical memory itself. A black ribbon woven into the belt references the grassroots civic movement that has long marked sites of silenced tragedy, making the hidden visible. Through the act of performance, the belt ceases to be an artistic element and becomes a witness-object – a material carrier of presence, an apotropaion that transforms the gesture of encircling into an act of remembrance, protection, and belated farewell.

The project was created at the Mochnarte residency within the framework of Clinton’s Bench, curated by Uladzimir Hramovich.