I present here a filmed performance that took place in Memento Park, a site filled with propaganda statues from the socialist era.
The idea was to perform within the park in order to reactivate these monuments and transform the space into an esoteric zone of power, an inverted sanctuary, a cemetery of ideologies.
Here, the statues become relics of a fallen authority, charged with residual energy.
The performance took the form of a healing ritual using simple objects: red candles, red ribbons, and red fabrics, my own silkscreen works.
It was conceived as a ritual of disobedience in front of the figures of authoritarian leaders, an act of symbolic liberation, a moment of interruption.
A park filled almost exclusively with male statues hosts me: a woman who performs quasi-liturgical, counter-rituals of purification before the fallen monuments.
During the performance, I touch the statues, encircle them with red ribbons, and light candles at their feet. This gesture becomes a process of awareness, emancipation, and reappropriation. It allows for a re-mystification of the real, a rekindling of forces suppressed by ideology, transforming the memory of violence into a reflection of the sacred.
Socialism once sought to eradicate the sacred and the magical in the name of rationality and progress.
Totalitarianism, patriarchy, and the cult of control embodied by these statues are confronted here by mythic and irrational processions, an anarchic gesture against monuments of power.
At the center of the video stands the star, composed of red flowers, echoing the communist symbol.
During the performance, I create my own inverted star with red ribbon.
This becomes the central action: the inversion of power itself.
The inverted star evokes both occult symbology and the fall of the regime.
By overturning the star, I turn a sign of domination into a symbol of feminine and spiritual reclamation, a gesture of contemporary witchcraft.
The star becomes a portal between past and present, politics and magic.
Bringing ritual and magic into a place marked by domination and violence creates a necessary tension, a means of liberation and remembrance.
It is also a reminder that evil has a tendency to return.
These rituals act as a form of protection against authoritarianism, nationalism, xenophobia, and patriarchy, forces that, as we witness today, persist and grow stronger.
Lina Filipovich