DIVAS facilitate artistic exchange and kinship in the field of performing arts in order to find new ways of thinking about culture making and challenging formats of artistic production. It is a flexible network for artists involved in questioning artistic, social and political realms, as well as transforming them from an embodied, inclusive perspective. Due to a q in queer for questioning, different neurodivergent conditions and sensitivity towards life, practices of care and adapting modes of working to our positions, needs and desires is important to us.
DIVAS is committed to the idea of artists working together, sharing the responsibility and actively participating in the process of shaping the local and international scene. DIVAS is not fixed but ongoing, a process of both exile and reclaiming and restoring what's been driven past the edges.
A current core team incl. Aga Pędziwiatr, Rafał Pierzyński, Mira Rojzman formed to facilitate our projects in 2024 - 2025
in close collaboration with satellite artists Agata Grabowska, Cosima Grand, Yann Slattery, Tyra Wigg, among others.
DIVAS function as a multifold alter ego and a creative structure for those who wanna share their light, their heat, their wetness. While performing, they blend and mix dancing, singing, writing and touching into different immersive formats like performance-treatments, rituals, letters, or stories - sometimes performed one on one.
DIVAS explore touching, embodied communication, and magic in order to question the notions of normativity, identity, and sexuality. Uncovering layers of their life conditioning and violence of living in western, binary and capitalist culture seems like labour they were born to do. Living from a queer perspective is a process.
They wanna go outside the social norms and their own comfort zones. Through their practices, they question issues connected to notions of normativity, identity, freedom, sexuality, communication, also capitalism, and political concerns from discrimination to ecology.
DIVAS are mostly inspired by their travels - those that happen inside as well as those through time and space.
Each of divas is bringing their personal experiences related to growing up in the blocks of flats, going abroad, and last but not least - the presence of wonderful women in their life.
DIVAS are supposed to share the light. The name for the collective is an attempt to continue and add to the figure of a diva as open, strong energy that is not connected to the concept of gender, pop culture nor consumption but rather to an urge to nourish and share the strength that comes from the open body-mind, physical practices and the light of stars that we all carry inside.
In their performances, they use nakedness, clothes, masks, poetry, humor, and other elements (often coming from the mass culture) in order to underline what kinds of corruption capitalism is bringing into our lives. Also to talk about difficult topics and provoke reflections and simply laugh together and about each other, sometimes through tears.
The most interesting places for DIVAS are those which escape the conventional stage settings. They love long and slow transformations in new spaces, insisting that everything around them slows down as well, creating atmospheres of a weird dream. DIVAS are performing in galleries, theatres, staircases, and parties.
DIVAS exchange letters when they are far from each other as well as when they are close. They write from a perspective of inanimate objects connected to water, who is probably a synonym of love.
Aga is a Soap, Rafal is a Mask and Magda is a Shower. Some other magical creatures that were a part of our journeys took part in this practice as well becoming among other things Towel or a Stream.
In their past projects, they also explored the work through touch (or rather getting in touch) mostly based on Rafal's research during his master studies (Embodied Communication- attending to the modes of touch) and his experience with the craniosacral biodynamics.
They created a format of CLINICA DE DIVAS TRANSFORMATIVAS that is a one to one fake healing performance using story-telling, poetry, lip-syncing and bodywork.
They occasionally write poems, especially while going to a sauna.
DIVAS play cause paradox is not there to be resolved.
DIVAS started with Rafał Pierzyński and Aga Pędziwiatr in 2016 and since then is based in Zurich, Switzerland. For past 7 years DIVAS collaborated and exchanged with many inspiring artists and cultural makers among others: Esther Eppstein, Magda Drozd, Agata Grabowska, Yann Slattery, Mira Rojzman, Tyra Wigg, Kathrin Veser, Marc Streit and Simone Aughterlony / Forever Imbricated, Juan Ferrari, Nagi Gianni, Cosima Grand, Thilda Prairie, Morea Gërxhaliu, Thea Reifler, Pitchaya Ngamcharoen, Marcel Babazadeh, Nagi Gianni and Yazmin Taco.