The Arena marks the culminating moment of the long-term project Monument of Trust, an artistic inquiry into corruption as one of the defining conditions of the contemporary world, as well as into the mechanisms and operations of power. Developed through a series of delegated performances, the project approaches corruption not merely as a criminal or institutional issue, but as a pervasive state of contemporary life — a mode of thinking, behaving, and relating. Conceived across diverse spatial and institutional contexts, it understands corruption as a symptom that permeates social systems as deeply as it shapes individual consciousness. It manifests through pressure, uncertainty, humiliation, and a persistent sense of powerlessness, producing a reality in which trust is continuously eroded and responsibility increasingly appears unattainable. While earlier works in the series traced fractures within systems shaping contemporary subjectivity, The Arena turns toward their aftermath — a condition in which collapse is no longer an isolated event, but an enduring state. Corruption is no longer perceived as deviation, but as structure: an invisible architecture permeating institutions, relationships, and bodies. Within the logic of neoliberal rationality, it dismantles trust, reshapes perception, and generates a shared condition of instability and affective exhaustion.
Conceived as a durational, site-specific performance, The Arena unfolds as an immersive environment in which the boundary between stage and audience dissolves. A monumental scaffold structure, shaped like a real arena, encloses the space, producing an intensified sense of containment — an arena of life without an outside. At the outset, performers occupy the second and third levels of the structure, while the audience remains in the central lower space, surrounded by bodies in positions of power. At regular intervals, performers descend and enter into direct relation with the audience, gradually dissolving spatial and symbolic hierarchies. Bodies circulate between elevated and grounded positions, collapsing distance and generating direct, unavoidable contact between performers and spectators. Sound functions as a central dramaturgical element, shaping rhythm, tension, and the affective dynamics of the performance. The sound installation, developed in collaboration with composer Mads Bitman, unfolds as a continuous looped composition structured through the alternation of two distinct sonic states corresponding to the movement of bodies. When performers occupy the upper levels — positioned in power, gazing down upon the audience — the sonic landscape is charged with explosions, ruptures, and the acoustics of destruction. At precisely timed twenty-minute intervals, this sonic continuum is abruptly interrupted by the bells of Wall Street — a clear signal of transition. Their resonance gradually transforms into a requiem as performers descend into the arena and merge with the audience. This cyclical movement — ascent and descent, power and collapse — repeats over the course of five hours. With each cycle, bodies visibly exhaust themselves: they begin to fall, to linger, to rest — fatigue inscribes itself into the very temporality of the choreography. Sound does not merely accompany action; it structures it, generating tension, anticipation, and release. The bells function both as temporal markers and symbolic ruptures, aligning bodily movement with the rhythms of capital and positing corruption as an embedded logic of the system.
The delegated male body emerges as an unstable site where power, vulnerability, submission, and resistance intersect. Positioned simultaneously as subject and object of the gaze, it becomes both a surface of projection and a carrier of contradiction. The continuous inversion of the gaze produces a mirror effect, exposing the norms and hierarchies that structure collective life. Emerging from In Him We Trust (2020), conceived as a reconstruction of the Last Judgment, The Arena extends its logic. While the earlier work marked the collapse of a system — a moment of rupture — this one inhabits what follows: a prolonged state of limbo shaped by late capitalism, the production of conflict and segregation, and an insatiable drive toward success — a space in which we drift like ghosts, as data, as fragmented algorithms, moving through corrupted minds and fractured realities. The experience produced by The Arena is entirely encompassing — spatial, sonic, and bodily. The density of bodies, the intensity of sound, and the closed architecture generate a condition in which the viewer no longer remains outside, but becomes fully implicated — a world without distance, where power circulates endlessly, without an external vantage point from which it can be observed. The Arena offers no resolution. It remains suspended in tension — where exhaustion becomes both a physical reality and a political metaphor — opening the question: what forms of togetherness are still possible in a world that persistently dismantles the conditions for solidarity?