DECADENCE
2026

Decadence is a 15–20 minute participatory performance staged as a fully functioning fitness class, instructor, intervals, music, where knitting replaces fitness as the performed activity.

Participants sit in rows with needles and yarn, led through fixed intervals of fast knitting, slow knitting, and enforced stillness by a live instructor (performed by me), modeled on HIIT, spinning, and Pilates: intense, intimate, casually cruel. Knitting has historically been circular - a communal knitting circle. Here it's rearranged into rows facing a single instructor, the same shift from collective craft to individualized, commodified self-improvement. Staged in an existing sports venue, the piece plays with ritual, instruction, performativity, wholesomeness as discipline: a class convincing enough to be mistaken for one.

Decadence holds both of its meanings at once: indulgence, excess made virtuous, and decline, in its oldest sense - a civilization perfecting its rituals of self while its structures fall apart. The wellness industry fuses the two, repackaging self-punishment as pleasure and excess as self-betterment; knitting, with its halo of patience and care, is the perfect vehicle for that collapse. The format travels easily, and is adaptable in scale and venue, from gyms to studios to gallery spaces across cities.

The work draws from my novel-in-progress, in which a fictional club called Decadence stages knitting as society's dominant marker of health and status. For seven years my practice has staged self-optimization and institutional discipline as durational performance; Decadence extends that from solo, video-based work into live collective participation for the first time.

In the autumn 2026 it will be presented in Kaunas Performance Art Weekend, as well as Sofia Art week.