Itch, 20-minute performance.

Complaint lives in the body. Often unspoken, always present. An allergic reaction is resistance beneath language. It does not argue or negotiate. It reacts.

When the body responds to substances is also responding to systems: industrial food production, care structures that manage rather than understand, the demand to adapt and endure. Allergy refuses adaptation. It insists something is wrong, even when no language exists for it.

Oftentimes, allergic responses are dismissed as excess, as sensitivity.
With ‘itch’ they are understood as messages of a body filing a complaint in real time – through rash, constriction, inflammation – forcing attention where systems prefer silence.
The allergic body makes the problem visible. It interrupts. It erupts. In doing so, it becomes knowledge: a living archive of critique.

To live with an allergy is to live at the threshold, a porous body in a toxic world: itching, swelling, continually filing complaints.

Photo credit Arianna Cavalensi and Anne Lakeman
Special thanks to Ksenia Perek for performance mentoring
Costume design by Irina Djojoatmodjo