Vivisections is the debut intermedial project by Simona Kasprowicz — a performance unfolding at the intersection of alternative opera, soundscape, physical movement, and multimedia installation. Conceived as an intimate, visceral exploration of selfhood, fragmentation, and survival, the work marked the beginning of Simona’s artistic journey, setting the foundations for the themes and strategies that continue to shape her practice.
Premiered on July 29, 2016, Vivisections was first presented as a standalone performance and later featured at the Konfrontacje Teatralne Festival in Lublin in 2017 — further developing its resonance with broader audiences and artistic communities.
The piece begins with the rupture of existential inertia: a moment of awakening where numbness gives way to uncomfortable awareness. From there, Vivisections moves into a restless process of questioning — dismantling inherited structures of meaning, peeling away projections, myths, and internalized norms that once seemed inseparable from identity. Structured around the dynamic between solitude, community, and the uneasy return to solit(ude), the work navigates the spaces between being seen, being misread, and being alone with oneself. It asks: what remains when the scaffolding collapses? What can be salvaged when subjectivity is no longer anchored in external validation?
While Vivisections originates in a deeply personal space, it refuses to remain locked in autobiography. Time, distance, and creative collaboration with Arkadiusz Sławek, Natalia Trojgo, and Małgorzata Wasilek pushed the project into a broader field — allowing the specificity of personal experience to resonate with collective and systemic realities. Through this evolution, Vivisections becomes less about documenting an individual story and more about performing a process: the messy, nonlinear work of surviving systems that constantly demand coherence, performance, and legibility.
The work resists the smooth narratives of trauma and recovery often demanded of marginalized bodies. Instead, it holds open the space where collapse and becoming coexist — where the self must be reassembled not as a stable entity, but as a shifting, unfinished, radically contingent presence. Vulnerability here is not a weakness to be overcome; it is a practice of endurance, a strategy of resistance.
As a debut, Vivisections established the core of Simona Kasprowicz’s artistic vocabulary: a commitment to refusing simple resolutions, a belief in the political urgency of fragmentation and process, and a deep investment in art as a space where personal and structural violence can be confronted — but not necessarily healed. Through voice, body, and broken narrative, Simona began a practice of making visible what is usually obscured: the labor of becoming, the violence of visibility, and the persistence of survival against all odds.
Vivisections was developed with the support of the Artistic Scholarship of the Mayor of Lublin and was co-produced by the Centre for Culture in Lublin.
Visual realization: Arkadiusz Sławek; Video and visual realization: Natalia Trojgo; Visual realization: Małgorzata Wasilek; Production: Simona Kasprowicz; Production collaboration: Natalia Trojgo; Co-production: Centrum Kultury w Lublinie
