…or fingers at the tip of my words
How to begin, how to let go?
I am writing this as I sit on a train to Berlin. Soon, I will say “Hello, Berlin”, but Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, in his new performance Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin), is already whispering “Goodbye, Berlin”. The movement of the train mirrors my own thoughts – things slip past the window too quickly to grasp, dissolving into the distance just as I begin to notice them. I think about the performance I saw, how certain moments still flicker in my mind, refusing to settle. There’s something about this in-between space, this suspension between departure and arrival, that echoes the way the piece unfolded – never quite arriving, never fully letting go.
Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin) unfolds like a lingering farewell, a body tracing slow, circular movements with a single finger. A gaze meets mine. For a moment, it is only us – an intimate seduction in the vastness of the stage. The air between us thickens, electric. It is an invitation, a quiet provocation that makes my skin hum. The space around me fades, the theater dissolves. I am blinded by the contours of the body – flickering images that vanish, only to return with full presence.
I imagine myself in a club, held in a trance by this body that moves as if it already knows me. But the seduction is unstable – it tempts, then withdraws. I reach out, but it shifts before I can grasp it – as if it had always known me. The movements hold echoes of cabaret, yet something feels displaced, distorted. The gestures are familiar but untethered, as if borrowed from a past that refuses to fully return.
Then other bodies emerge. One by one they enter the scene, each carrying a presence that feels at once personal and fragmented. Their movements suggest a yearning, but they never settle. They shift between visibility and absence, forcing me to navigate between what is offered and what is withheld. Sometimes the temporality reminds me that life is fragile – that moments slip past before we can hold them, that what seems infinite is always already vanishing.
Bodies touch, hold, release. Again and again they refuse resolution.
This is not a seamless entanglement. It is friction, a choreography of fleeting encounters and disjointed intimacies that unfold as a series of sketches – moments that come alive and then vanish. The repetition of cabaret-like gestures does not reinforce sameness; instead, each iteration mutates, resisting fixity. Some movements are more precise than others – calculated, deliberate – while others feel looser, rougher, as if resisting definition altogether. And I am reminded: queerness is never pristine, never precise. It is a process of becoming, of undoing, of making and unmaking over and over again. A refusal to be fixed. A refusal to arrive. No singular body, no singular identity – only multiplicities, shifting relationships, a network in constant motion.
At some point, the bodies all disappear. The stage is empty – only the lights and the music remain, performing in their absence. Looking away for a moment, my attention drifts to Krzysztof Bagiński, who gives the sound presence. The music is not passive; it is performed, practiced – an intrusion of fragmented voices, distorted radio broadcasts, the ringing of a telephone. It does not simply accompany the movement; it punctuates it, cutting through the space like an after-image of something already lost. Slowly, the bodies begin to creep back, their postures reminiscent of something decaying. The tension hums – not an overt strain, but a subterranean pull. As the bodies form a circle, almost relying on each other to stay still, there is something unsettling even in the gestures of fragility and dependence.
Where does it end, where does it begin?
A shift. Tea is served. It feels like returning home from a night out – an attempt to soothe, to reclaim stillness. And yet the moment is laced with irony. The scene flirts with sophistication, a bohemian elegance that never quite settles into sincerity. It performs itself. Even here, in this gesture of repose, the theatricality lingers.
For a moment, I think this is the end. But then…
A sudden rupture. The bodies begin to gather in a circle and dance again. But this time the movements feel different. Faster. Angrier. More urgent. The air thickens once more, but now with something else – something raw, something pressing, something that becomes a force that refuses to be held back. Withdrawal becomes propulsion, hesitation becomes command. It is as if time itself has begun to slip away, as if the bodies know that the lights could be turned off at any moment. And then they are.
Darkness. Silence. But the bodies do not stop moving.
Because even when the music stops, when the curtains fall, life moves forward. Relentlessly, unfinished, beginning again. To hold loss and euphoria in the same breath. To exist in that strange, suspended space where everything ends and begins at the same time.
Michał Leszuk ist Kurator im Kunstverein Kevin Space in Wien.