AIf we prepare for war, we will get war.

Something is tightening.

We can all feel it.

And yet we keep pulling, each in our own direction, for as long as it holds.

Something is tightening.

In our stomachs. In our city. In our language.

Words like security, defence, readiness, and resilience are becoming increasingly common. Yet behind these words, the image of a society once again reorganising itself around the inevitability of war is coming into sharper focus.

The Knot begins with this sense of tension: the unease that emerges when preparing for war is presented as the only rational way to care for the future; when Europe announces hundreds of billions of euros for rearmament, and states continue to increase their military budgets.

The performance is woven from small, concrete situations in which large-scale political violence reveals itself as something intimate, embodied, and already present. Here, militarisation is not merely a matter of weapons and budgets, but of the ways fear, violence, and the loss of the future become embedded in everyday life.

Rijeka is a city where the histories of labour, industry, war, and broken promises have accumulated layer upon layer. What does it mean if the future begins once again to be built through military production? And what else can we build from these ruins?

The performance incorporates motifs from the books The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing and Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology by Anne Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt; the monograph Upoznajmo 3. Maj, edited by Viktor Hreljanović; photographs by Jadranka Lacković, as well as those collected from the private archives of the 3. Maj shipyard workers through the project 3. Maj – Studija zaborava; and excerpts from Petar Trinajstić's film Kako se gradi brod (1983).