Following the performance, the scenography of Salty Juice of a Ripe Fig remains in the space as a spatial installation: objects, costumes, videos, and sounds unfold as a fragmented landscape that the audience can enter and reactivate. The costumes of the performers linger like ghosts, while the objects stand still, waiting to be animated again in the next performance.
The installation follows a process-driven approach in which ideas, materials, and bodies are collaged into shifting assemblages. Reorganized into islands, the scenographic elements gather around traces of their characters: the mermaid on her rock; the beach guard’s chair and megaphone; the mussel’s costume with its sculpted headpiece; the fig mask and the sea mine suit from the final scene. A suspended sail anchors the space and becomes a surface for poetic cinema. These fragments sketch a world in transition, where functional objects take on new roles as both sculptural forms and performative tools.
The project is led by author Daria Lytvynenko in collaboration with performers Yana Kolodiychuk and Mykola Naboka, sculptor Jürgen Münzer, costume designer Yulia Makarenko, multimedia artist Stefan Krische, and sound artist Clemens Poole. Their work brings together movement, physical theatre, installation, sound, poetic cinema, and archival imagery. Together they create a fragmented story, woven from different media, that invites the audience to reflect on the present of the Crimean Peninsula and draws attention to how Russian propaganda has systematically used the romanticized image of the Southern Coast to displace local history.
The work explores the state of uprootedness and the acceptance of memories that are difficult to live with in a single body. It is about a seaside town and a rocky stone overshadowed by the heavy branch of a lush fig tree. About salty eyelashes, dried by sea water. About relatives who appear in memory as warm images, yet with stories that remained unspoken. It is also about childhood friends who took the side of the enemy. And about local children whose paths were known to the mainland only through short summer trips to camp. About historical monuments and sanatoriums whose legacy and function are directly tied to foreign power. About a territory that seemingly belongs to no one, yet in fact concerns everyone.
Crimea is perceived as unfamiliar, alienated, often pro-Russian, and currently unreachable. The sense of isolation that always existed in relation to the mainland reached a critical point after the occupation. In conversations about the peninsula’s return, personal stories are often generalized, or sometimes abstracted entirely. In formal plans and strategies of reintegration, painful facts and lived realities are lost — surviving only in memory and in the body.
Let us imagine a situation where Crimea is de-occupied. What will become the starting point for dialogue between the mainland and the peninsula? Could this dialogue begin in the heat of summer — on the beaches of Gurzuf, Alupka, Simeiz, or Mishor?
The exhibition will run from October 7 to 19
Opening hours: 12:00-20:00 on weekdays, 11:00-20:00 on Saturdays and Sundays, Mondays are closed.
Location: Novo 1 Space, 124 B. Khmelnytskyi St.
Free admission
The performance Salty Juice of a Ripe Fig is part of the Jam Factory Art Centre’s repertoire. To find out the dates of upcoming performances, follow the information on the art centre’s website jamfactory.ua and social media pages.
Author, concept, director, text & video: Daria Lytvynenko
Scenography, object creation & spatial design: Jürgen Münzer
Performance & creation: Daria Lytvynenko with Yana Kolodiychuk & Mykola Naboka
Video design & editing: Stefan Krische
Sound design & composition: Clemens Poole
Costume design & creation: Yulia Makarenko
Artistic & movement consulting: Maria Shurkhal
Stage design & assistance: Sasha Bezyemska, Polina Zhilina
Lighting design: Serhiy Klymets
Project manager: Yevheniia Melkonian
Production manager: Vlad Bilonenko
Curator of the project After the Devastation: Liuba Ilnytska