ABSENT REFERENT
ABSENT REFERENT is a performance installation that investigates grief, medicine and the female body through live performance. Developed following the loss of my sister to ovarian cancer, the work draws on autobiographical material while resisting confession as its primary mode. Instead, it creates a shared space of witnessing where personal experience becomes a point of departure for broader questions about care, spectatorship and the medical gaze.
Combining physical endurance, sculptural environments and material transformation, the performance invites audiences to move through the installation and construct their own relationships to the work. ABSENT REFERENT explores how bodies carry memory, how grief reshapes perception, and how performance can create forms of intimacy beyond language.
Year
2026
Concept & Performance
Isidora Goncic
Artistic Support
Nova Krause
Photography
Thomas Lenden
Developed at
DAS Theatre, Amsterdam University of the Arts
WHAT I NEVER TOLD YOU
WHAT I NEVER TOLD YOU is a performance that explores grief, memory and the unfinished conversations we continue to carry after loss. Developed following the death of my sister, the work moves between confession, humour, ritual and direct address, questioning how language changes when the person it was meant for is no longer there to hear it. Through autobiographical material, songs, images and theatrical actions, the performance transforms private remembrance into a shared space of witnessing, where intimacy emerges not from explanation, but from being present together.
Year
2025
Concept & Performance
Isidora Goncic
Production
Heartefact, Belgrade
Developed with the support of
Pavle
Rather than reconstructing a personal history, WHAT I NEVER TOLD YOU uses performance as a space where memory remains active and unstable. Fragments of everyday life, family rituals, music and silence coexist without seeking a single narrative or resolution. The work embraces contradiction—holding tenderness alongside absurdity, vulnerability alongside laughter—and asks how theatre can sustain a relationship with those who are no longer physically present. In doing so, it invites audiences not to observe grief from a distance, but to inhabit its shifting textures together.
PRAIRE OYSTERS
PRAIRIE OYSTERS stages a world where the familiar slowly becomes grotesque. Through sharp humour and escalating absurdity, the performance examines patriarchal power, coercion and the fragile line between care and control. Rather than presenting violence as spectacle, the production reveals how it can emerge through everyday gestures, language and social rituals.
As a director, I was interested in creating a visual and physical performance language that allowed comedy and discomfort to exist simultaneously. The production invited audiences to laugh before confronting the structures that made that laughter possible, exposing the contradictions that underpin both personal relationships and broader social systems.
Year
2019
Playwright
Vedrana Klepica
Director
Isidora Goncic
Production
Atelje 212, Belgrade
