It takes special attention of a person living with the luxury of peace and time, to notice how their comfortable life in the contemporary Western world is imbued with a sense of casual violence. Tensions and microaggressions produced in everyday friendly language, the scars of violent history weighing heavy on the public space, and the relentless wrangling to master and prevail in social interaction. On a regular basis, we are confronted with sparks of a kind of violence that does not immediately cause visible damage, but colors the psychopathology of everyday life in the white West. And it demonstrates on the visible surface the tip of the iceberg that hides brutal Western histories and memories. 

The Third Room is a performance in which Christine De Smedt, Liza Baliasnaja and Theo Livesey explore the multiple forms of what they refer to as ‘low-intensity violence’. This term depicts erosion, a process of destruction that takes place over a long period of time, without a concrete point of beginning or end. In small doses, repeatedly, and in an accumulative pattern, we register it, and we unsee it; we experience it, witness it, and perpetuate it. Its shape-shifting nature escapes us, making it nearly impossible to comprehend in its entirety.

The three performers play games of hectic insults and bickering, revealing how language is an easy device for wielding power. They mount situations in which their bodies swing between the positions of perpetrator, witness and victim. Intensifying these sparks of violence, their performative stunts pierce through the fictions of non-violence, freedom, and peaceful coexistence which have shaped the Western social ideal.