fotók

Performance with Zsófi Rebeka Kozma
Playful Hevruta (learning) with Klára Cserne

The word Shmita in Hebrew means to let go and according to the Bible it means a year when according to Jewish law the farmers have to let the land rest, it is forbidden to cultivate. This year comes every seven years, which rhymes with, Shabbat - Sabbath - every seven days. This compulsory rest, a rule to separate work and leisure, has really clicked since my leisure activity, my hobby
became more and more my work and I felt a mad need not to let the two merge. For me, relaxing, not doing, became the only means of feeling in control of my imaginary struggle with capitalism.
That's when I started to explore performative means to capture this phenomenon and made a dance performance out of it. Now I'm trying a different direction: a sound installation, which I propose to listen to while lying on the ground, to observe the feelings and memories that are evoked by the contact with the ground. What we can let into the earth, what we can give and receive from it, whether we can feel some kind of symbiosis lying in a garden in the middle of the city. The participant is given space to separate work from leisure or what he or she has to separate at any given moment. There will be doing and not-doing. After a lie-in, there may even be a joint letting-go dance ritual. And a Sabbath reception. And learning.

The main contributor to this program is the Paideia - The European Institute of Jewish Studies in Sweden, Migfash project.