I hardly remember the streets of my childhood in Volgograd, but since we left there as contingent refugees in September 2001 and the World Trade Center was blown up at the same time - a parallel development between world events and the small family diaspora opened up.

Growing up in the heart of Europe, cut off from the influences of its fringes and with the emotional chaos of 1990s Russia in the background, I struggled to understand migration policies here at the age of 9. All the spaces for action that we developed as a small family unit were largely a migrant subculture, made up of years of tries and errors, experimental ways that each newly arrived family in Germany lived differently to cope with the external system. These childhood experiences and my research journeys inevitably bring me to collaborative practices in the NOW, in the connection of body politics and dance floors, in communities, and in how they heal themselves by their means.

Creating spaces as an artist – I see my daily practice more like fieldwork by engaging myself in communities around non- academic, suburban practices and landscapes – habitats that harbor more life than ruled and hierarchically organized systems. Presence for me always means “presence-with” – an act of co-existing. So my work takes place in dance improvisation influenced by the cypher communities worldwide and its activist aspect. The active decision not to use too many materials, but body language, movements, gestures, and postures from cinema and archival footage, embodied memories, and urban dance lexicons, I choreograph through interviews, reenactments, adaptations, and improvisational play.

Coming back to today’s world flow, the aggressive attacks on Ukraine by Russia, the right-wing pressure growing in Germany, and Israel’s decision to erase Palestine from the map. I find myself with my background as a Russian Jew in a country that avoids every voice in the cultural scene against the genocide of Palestinians and asks myself how to construct a parallel system of identities that can support each other through deep empathy, running parallel to the institutions.

My artistic practice was deeply influenced by the recent two-year journey of the apprenticeship at the „École des Sables“ and the collaboration with the „SAMA STREET VIBE African movement“in Senegal. Questions appeared: