Tubi Malcharzik & Team - PASKUDNIK
‘Paskudnik’ is a post-migrant drag persona who got lost during the crossing of the border between Germany and Poland, between the past and the future. ‘Paskudnik’ is a word that was often used by the grandfather to address the grandchild. In memory, it is located somewhere between dining table, soccer match, parasite, and disgust. There is no unambiguous translation. What the term means exactly remains unclear. With the performance PASKUDNIK, Tubi Malcharzik takes a queer view on the own German-Polish family history and sets off on a search for this familiar yet undecipherable hole in the collective family memory.
One hundred years after the referendum in the border region of Upper Silesia, around fifty years after Willy Brandt’s genuflection and the arrival of the family at the immigrant transit camp Friedland in the Federal Republic of Germany, Malcharzik and an interdisciplinary team take ‘Paskudnik’ as the starting point of a performance which rolls up migration history backwards. Immersive soundscapes, narrative fragments and imagination open a queer and post-migrant space of memory.
The team invites the audience to the dining table of an Upper Silesian family festivity and to the interface of a dating app until these places connect for the duration of a song. Based on a red velvet dress, myths of high cheekbones and songs by t.A.T.u. and Peter Alexander, the performance touches on themes of gender roles, sexuality, queerness and anti-Slavism as well as Polish-German remembrance culture.