Adriana Štefaňáková's site-specific performance is a live, interactive performance that takes place directly in busy urban spaces. It explores how screens and social networks transform our everyday interactions and weaken real connections between people. It reflects our growing dependence on the digital world and the phenomenon of overexposure - where people share things they would never reveal in the offline world.
What are we losing? Perhaps the ability to be present. When we meet someone interesting on the street, instead of stopping, we pull out our phone. We filter reality through the screen - and flatten it at the same time. What do we gain? The illusion of control. We can choose what we see, who we talk to, how we present ourselves. But the control is false - the algorithm is actually choosing for us.
Performers appear as living avatars - exaggerated, explicit versions of the identities we present to ourselves online. At first, they inhabit the space almost unobtrusively. Gradually, they enter the mainstream of the city, blurring the line between performance and the everyday. There is no clear beginning or end - the performance emerges spontaneously, just like the unpredictable life of the street.
What happens when that carefully curated identity finds itself on a street where no one is watching? Where people react to it with their bodies, their looks, their embarrassment? Where you can't delete a comment because that comment is a living person facing you? It is in that discomfort - in the chance encounter with someone completely different - that something alive is created.
The show is also an exploration of physical interaction between people who pass each other in everyday life and don't know each other. The aim is to awaken curiosity, to remind us of the value of real encounters and to create a situation in which people can inspire each other - even through different opinions or ways of perceiving the world. The dance component is raw and physically urgent, built on trust and proximity of bodies.
Overexposed is a unique combination of dance, technology and social research. It enriches the public space and opens up discussion about dependencies, algorithms and human interconnectedness. A reflection of a time in which we are at war over who will be seen more - and forgetting how to be truly together.
Annotation:
Adriana Štefáňáková: Overexposed
