Pronounced: Saʃa Asentitʃ

Pronouns: he/him/his

Saša Asentić is a choreographer and cultural worker.

He was born in a working-class family in the Socialist Federal Republic of  Yugoslavia. During the war against the SFR Yugoslavia, as an antimilitarist, he illegally escaped in 1995 from Bosnia and found refuge in Serbia, where he became active within the independent cultural scene in the late 1990s.

Since 2007, his artistic work has been presented internationally in major venues and festivals of contemporary performing arts across Germany, as well as in New York, Paris, Tokyo, Vienna, Athens, Moscow, and other cities.

Asentić is a founder of Per.Art organization, which gathers since 1999 a group of disabled and non-disabled artists, that challenge and counter ableism in dance and culture.

Asentić works in the field of contemporary dance, performance, and disability arts. His artistic practice is based on the principle of solidarity, and resistance against cultural oppression and indoctrination.

After being a victim of homophobic and xenophobic violence, and fundamentally disagreeing with the corruption in the public sector in Serbia and the right-wing renaissance, he moved to Germany in 2011. He lives and works between Oslo, Novi Sad, and Berlin.

My research is situated within the framework of the MEMORYWORK project, a platform dedicated to sharing interdisciplinary artistic research on performative memory work.

A central question of MEMORYWORK is: “Whose stories are heard, retold, and given attention?”. As an artist and cultural activist, I share this concern. My practice operates at the intersection of contemporary dance, performance, and disability arts. The critical examination of dance historicization, the process of learning from various witnesses, actors, and participants, and the analysis of diverse forms of both official and alternative archives play a significant role in shaping my artistic and research endeavors. My approach to dance history is influenced by Walter Benjamin’s concept of history, which challenges the notion of history as a continuous, linear process. Instead, it makes the present moment political, aiming to change and revolutionize it as a legacy for the future. In my artistic practice, I employ reconstruction as a method of resistance against ableism in dance and cultural oppression. Through this process, I re-actualize works, concepts, practices, or events from the past that have been overlooked, forgotten, or erased from collective memory and (dance) history.

Another critical concern of the MEMORYWORK project that I engage with is the examination of “intangible structures” that shape how we perceive and remember the past, and consequently, how we understand the world around us. I believe these "intangible" structures are, in fact, very tangible, concrete, and material. The belief that they are elusive, immaterial, or invisible is, in itself, part of the problem. The normative, ableist, capitalist system disciplines us to think, believe, and imagine in ways that maintain the status quo. These structures influence how we perceive, remember, and understand our past, present, and future. In my research project and artistic practice, I strive to articulate the anti-ableist struggle as an antifascist struggle, and to mobilize "all that which is left out, discarded, destroyed, weakened, and exhausted—from our capacities to think and materialize collectively demands for a more inclusive justice and societal transformation to all the excluded forms of life, as well as new forms of life, or new subjectivities that produce a space for solidarity and commonality in the claims for equality for all.” (Arsenijević, para. 6, https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/40421/the-work-of-mourning-and-the-work-of-solidarity)

Throughout my three-year research period, I work on further development of accessibility provisions within my artistic practice and create research and presentation forms that prioritize accessibility as a core principle. This principle will serve as a foundation for inventing new modes of work, research, and sociability within artistic practice, which will, in turn, shape the aesthetics of access. Accessibility in this work is treated as a material condition, enabling an aesthetics of access that fosters new memories centered on solidarity and social justice.

The key question I examined so far in my artistic research activities is:

·        How can the aesthetics of access create new memories and change the affective states from which we perceive and remember the past, as well as understand the world around us?

As a non-disabled artist and cultural activist with 25 years of anti-ableist practice in the performing arts, I critically reflect on the potential of the aesthetics of access to create new memories and social facts. Additionally, I explore the role and responsibility of the artist, as a public worker, in building anti-discriminatory and accessible structures within the fields of dance and performance.

Related Projects and Resources: 

Dis Project - Repository of knowledge: disability perspectives on dance history, crisis in society, accessibility and body in public

https://www.dis-project.info/dis-contact

Per.Art - group of artists with and without learning disabilities in Novi Sad (Serbia)

https://www.facebook.com/per.art.arts.inclusion/?locale=nb_NO

Tanzerei - group of artists with and without learning disabilities in Berlin (Germany)

https://linktr.ee/tanzerei.berlin