Rafał Mazur

What drives people to renounce themselves – their body, language, species? Where does the need to disappear stem from – not solely as a gesture of refusal, but also as despair that finds no other form of expression? ‘The Vegetarian’ by the Nobel Prize winner Han Kang is a story about a rebel whose rebellion does not take on the form of a loud cry, but plays out in silence and understatement. By withdrawing from social, family and carnal life, the protagonist strives to completely negate her species affiliation. She yearns to become a tree. Her attempt to transform herself into a plant becomes a form of resistance against violence, gender, language and human desires.

Following the three-part structure of the novel, the creators draw on different languages – of movement, image and video. As the protagonist increasingly alienates herself from the world, language also disintegrates. Words give way to images and movement. Together with playwright Joanna Bednarczyk, painter Krzysztof Meżyk, choreographer Anna Obszańska and a company of actors, Paweł Miśkiewicz attempts to explore the attitude of radical refusal – a refusal which, unlike the passive ‘I'd rather not’ of Bartleby, the Scrivener, becomes an active gesture of opposition to the violence of the world, an attempt to liberate oneself from its oppressive structures – even at the cost of self-annihilation. Is silence a form of protest? Is disappearance a political gesture? Can species transformation be a form of salvation from the hell of anthropocentrism?