Artist Nikima Jagudajev (1990, US/AT/UZ) presents the live work Basically as part of their three-month residency at Scuola Piccola Zattere, from June to August 2025. Conceived as a living ecosystem, Basically transforms the spaces of Palazzo delle Zattere into an ever-changing environment, where temporary cohabitations, playful practices, and dance phrases shape an alternative temporality, shared between performers and visitors.

Basically is an ongoing live project. It utilizes the exhibition space as a hybrid production space and playground; a context to practice and perform within. Basically is structured as a choreographic game in which eight performers hold the rules of the game constant, incorporating visitors in visible and invisible ways. The work is governed by the formal rules as well as by the subjective interpretations that occur in interactions with and between the participating artists and visitors. The creation and re-creation of the environment is central in Basically. Each presentation is one moment in a long-term long-form megawork. Visitors are invited to experience how the works’ characters write the world of Basically into existence – and to become a part of this open-world, role playing game.

At the heart of this work and Jagudajev’s practice is re-schooling – a prefigurative practice inspired by playful ways students subvert the educational system. Some of the most creative and heartfelt acts of our early education, like self-organized play, flirting, or passing notes, were extra-curricular yet located within the institution. In Basically, the exhibition space as architecture and institution, contains this world in which other things are happening: eating and sharing conversations, making clothes and music, and surreptitiously playing a game.

Basically proposes something messy and accessible that envelopes the visitor, something uncontrollable and spontaneous that is open to contamination. With choreography Jagudajev offers another way of orienting ourselves, a different way of relating to art, not as something that we are separate from but as an integrative, prefigurative practice that offers contamination through unexpected encounters.

The Basically album, released in 2022, was featured on Salt Peanuts and included in Christina Vantzou’s Boomkat 2021 list, where it was ranked as her #7 release of the year. The album is available on Spotify.