Wanda & Nova deViator - ZVO.ČI.TI (So.und.ing) 2010

Co-effectuation: Maja Delak and Luka Prinčič alias Wanda & Nova deViator (text by: Tea Hvala)

The collaboration between Maja Delak and Luka Prinčič began last year with the performance Ways of Love and continued with Frozen Images – the latter was credited to pseudonyms Wanda and Nova deViator. Maja Delak is this year’s recipient of the Prešeren Foundation Award, a choreographer and dancer, who has behind her a considerable number of collaborations with different musicians, dancers, actors, and choreographers. The same goes for the musician, DJ, and intermedia artist Luka Prinčič, who first appeared as a performer precisely in the joint projects with Maja Delak, while in this exchange, Wanda picked up the microphone for the first time, wrote the lyrics for their trippy electro tracks, and also sang them.

Their projects intertwine many – often colliding – languages: rhythm, voice, music, noise; video, photography, theory; manifestoes, poetry. It seems that their reparatory investigation, this courageous picking up from all over, wagered on the possibility of their own surprise over the outcomes of their collaborative process and over what may emerge from their overlapping, dissonances, resonances, slips, and congruencies. It seems that their wager is won – as they have offered to the home audiences a new aesthetics and politics; well, at least to that part of the audience who had missed or overlooked the Ljubljana-based queer dissidents from the 80s.

Maja Delak and Luka Prinčič's performative events scream with punk ethics and kitchy porn chic aesthetics, which come together also in Western grassroots or DIY feminism of the “third wave”. I was reminded of the fact that this feminism skirted the borders of our country precisely at their appearance at the International Feminist and Queer Festival Red Dawns, where Frozen Images resonated as a genuine manifesto! It was a moment of relief and joy and empowerment, because the authors intentionally and unbendingly, passionately and sexily, approached the themes that are rarely dealt with in our space, certainly not at the same time: lust for enjoyment, anxiety, hypersexualisation and pornification of our bodies, violence, idealisation of love, and of course – the motor of everything – consumerism.

Ways of Love meander between the sampled, or temporarily “frozen”, scenes of two types of gender roles: those marked with violence and those founded on consensual submission and dominance. The insight into how to become aware of the power relations in relationships and how to break the vicious circle of violent love is disclosed in the performance precisely with the emptying of form – which could not be other than violent and painful. The second performance event, Frozen Images, raised a possibility of stirring up and overcoming the violence we exert over ourselves under the pressure of buy-and-sell images of Sex Appeal, Beauty, Health, Youth, and Success – with laughter. With lust. With objectifying to our own taste. With our own perverseness and again – with love.

This sumptuous and made-for-all-senses multimedia work by Maja Delak and Luka Prinčič is a genuine cut’n’paste, a swift image and sound collage that allows for many readings and listenings, many feelings and reflections. But only after one tears away from the fleeting images and voicings; only after one dances to the wild riot grrrl version of You Don’t Own Me, with Wanda and deViator jumping all over the stage. And this may very well be the most beautiful achievement or co-effectuation Maja Delak and Luka Prinčič’s collaboration: their accessibility and clarity – despite the work’s decentredness – makes their work is inspiring and empowering. Ultimately also because the “you” from You Don’t Own Me does not refer to a man made of flesh and blood but rather to Martell or some other corporation that imposes patriarchal patterns of behaviour for everyday use.