“In-Transit” was created for the sixteenth Performance Art Festival in Osijek, Croatia. It considers the term ‘political bodies’ and interrogates the migration of humans around the globe: waters carrying carrying bodies between oceans and rivers, the displacement of bodies as a risky transaction. The political implications of these contemporary dynamics are embedded in this participatory performance, where the idea of trespassing unstable territories seems to remain unnoticed.

Four people, including myself, floated in a boat on the Drava River. The performance lasted three hours, and the participants and artist stayed immobile, lying on jute bags. Their faces were covered with rags, invisible to passers-by. The boat, although floating on the current, mostly remained firmly in place, directly below the popular promenade of Osijek, which symbolizes domesticity, comfort, and the security of its everyday life. The location for this performance was key. Osijek had been merely brushed by the arrival and passage of the migrants, a city where a foreigner is anything but a common sight. The boat carrying the performers’ bodies floated on the water’s physical current, bringing to mind the political current also flowing through the issues raised by its passage. It was a spectacle that disturbed the city’s calm and serenity, showing that global problems do not happen somewhere else, on distant shores; they are in our present and presence.