Studies on Carrying II: Wāc Voice, 2026
Video Installation & Performance, 50 minutes
The second study, Wāc Voice, considers dependency itself as a site of agency. It celebrates the physical and emotional labor involved in being carried, challenging the tendency to understand the carried body as passive or less agentic than the body that carries or provides care.
Wāc—the Old English ancestor of weak—historically encompasses both fragility and the capacity to yield. Drawing on this ambiguity, Wāc Voice reframes the apparent absence of agency as a site of relational force. It points to the full-time effort required to manage a body outside societal norms, challenging a definition of ‘work’ based solely on economic output.
About the Project: Studies on Carrying deconstructs our social choreographies of dependency, surrender, and labor through the movement of carrying. The project translates carrying gestures that are usually hidden or illegible within private domains into public performances, texts, video installations, and sound works. The work stems from the artist’s experience undergoing cancer treatment, a period during which she had to relearn daily navigation and rewrite ideas of agency, labor, and interdependency. Drawing from crip and feminist discourses, the project unfolds in crip time, actively refusing the ableist readings so often imposed on disabled bodies.
Concept/Choreography/Text: Yon Natalie Mik
Performance: Yon Natalie Mik & Rina Nakano
Music: Banu Çiçek Tülü
Video Installation: Yon Natalie Mik
Support: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin