There are performances one watches — and others one crosses through.

Basically, the evolving work of Nikima Jagudajev, belongs resolutely to the latter. Presented in its Italian premiere at Scuola Piccola Zattere from July 23 to 25, 2025, during the artist’s three-month residency in Venice, Basically resists any attempt at linear narration. It is not meant to be observed, but rather lived.

The performance unfolded as an embryonic environment — a domestic space that had either forgotten, or not yet learned, how to function. Every gesture carried an ambiguous intensity. One oscillated, without warning, between ease and unease, intimacy and disorientation. The floor creaked. The breath of others grew dense. Postures stiffened. Then, all at once, a soft gesture, a shared glance, a song — and the space opened up anew.

Basically inhabits Palazzo delle Zattere as a living, porous ecosystem: a mutable terrain that can be entered, exited, inhabited, and altered. Eight performers move through shared yet flexible rules, generating a choreography with no defined beginning or end, no climax nor resolution. Time stretches, contracts, stands still. The rhythm is oblique, unstable: it offers no certainties, only cues — to be followed, or gently declined.

At the heart of the work lies a clear and radical proposition: active interaction. The audience is not merely invited to witness, but to step inside the game. Through a deck of cards — distributed at the entrance or introduced unexpectedly — each visitor may suggest actions, prompt shifts, or awaken dormant scenes. These gestures may be discreet, almost imperceptible — yet capable of rippling through the performance. The fragile equilibrium of the piece is not to be preserved but disturbed. The unforeseen is not feared; it is welcomed.

Everything in Basically moves according to relational logic. Bodies, sounds, objects, and micro-gestures respond to one another or drift apart. The choreography is never centralized, but scattered, lateral, at times subtractive. You may find yourself watching a hand softly grazing a wall, or eavesdropping on a conversation suspended mid-sentence. Around it all, sound — layered, delicate, at times unsettling — shapes the space as an invisible, insistent presence. It is less soundtrack than condition.

At the foundation of Jagudajev’s practice lies the concept of re-schooling: a prefigurative mode drawn from everything that unfolds at the margins of institutional education — glances, unsupervised games, gossip, flirtation. Those informal moments, often dismissed as distractions, are reframed here as fertile grounds of creativity, intimacy, and resistance. Basically brings them into the field of art — not as peripheral noise, but as matter.

Within this framework, Scuola Piccola Zattere is not a neutral host, but an implicated body. And Basically, with its traversable, mutable, and radically processual nature, fully embodies the ethos of the One Year Score program: not an exhibition, but a field of relation, where time, trust, and shared presence prevail over immediacy, and where things unfold simply because people come together — even if only for a fleeting moment.

As an extension of the performance, the album Basically — released in 2022 and available on Spotify — charts the sonic and emotional landscape of the project. Its ambient textures, distortions, and glitches echo the piece’s atmosphere, its tensions and openings.

Basically offers no moral, no resolution, no applause line. It dwells in a grey zone, demanding care, attention, and slowness. A choreography not as form, but as condition. A world that comes into being only if you choose to enter — without knowing what you’ll find.