Office of Emergency, Copenhagen
Performance
Without Lifting a Finger is a performance that examines the relationship between language, political rhetoric, and the construction of collective identities.
At a time when “foreign cultures” are increasingly perceived as a threat to national identity, cultural racism has become an important part of the political discourse and has contributed to the rise of right-wing movements across Europe. The work takes its point of departure in this political climate, where pride in one’s country can turn into nationalism, and where a sense of belonging is increasingly defined through the exclusion of others.
The performance is built from real comments and statements found across online platforms. These include discussions of immigration, national identity, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, cancel culture, vigilantism, and calls for civil conflict. The material is transformed into fictional dialogues between different characters and performed by five people from the former Yugoslavia who came to Denmark as refugees in the 1990s.
The conversations bring conflicting and often radical positions into confrontation. They move between heated debate, intolerance, political extremism, and satire, revealing how online language can normalize fear, hatred, and hostility towards others. Although the dialogues are based on real online posts, the scripts themselves are fictional.
Words that identify people through their national, political, or religious affiliations—such as Muslims, Christians, immigrants, left-wing, or right-wing—are removed from the dialogues. What remains are the two opposing categories US and THEM.
By reducing complex identities and political positions to this fundamental opposition, Without Lifting a Finger explores how language, political rhetoric, and digital communication can create divisions between people—and how the distinction between “us” and “them” can become a powerful tool for exclusion.
