the (in)credible performance at st. markos’s square

How should one move a particular space, especially one pregnant with historical and more recent inscriptions, by using one’s body?
  

From the history of political struggles, antagonisms, and direct conflicts that have taken place on st. Marko’s square, Zrinka Užbinec has chosen an almost forgotten action by a group of women, that has been erased from the dominant narrative. Ignoring the prohibition of gatherings, women organised an anti-monarchic protest in spring 1903. Various accounts of the event stem from a single author, Marija Jurić Zagorka, herself a participant. One of the sources directly linked to the protest is her dramatic text, a popular play in five acts titled “Evica Gubčeva”, which she wrote while in prison during that same year. The link between “Evica Gubčeva” and the protest has been established by means of various interpretations and records, rather different and even contradictory in nature, which is why the question of credibility of performance in the processes of recording, transcribing, and inscribing has been used here as a choreographic basis for collective action and enactment.

The (In)credible Performance on St. Marko’s Square has started as an action of transcription. Since the play “Evica Gubčeva” was never published in print and was performed only once in Zagreb due to censorship, the only remaining copy is a manuscript preserved at the Croatian Institute of History, a group of women has transcribed the text together during their organised visits to the Institute, part by part. Their visits to Opatička street were taking them over St. Marko’s Square, which meant that each act of traversing was a small action of inscribing the female body into a space that has been almost dominantly marked as a site of male political history.