Vala T. Foltyn

Vala T. Foltyn | Valentine Tanz is a performance artist, poetic choreographer, queer witch, shape-shifter, and founder of Lamella – the house of queer arts in Poland. She graduated from Shahar Dor’s Artness – Home and School for Movement (Israel) and Performers House (Silkeborg, Denmark). She holds a master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Vala studied at Mountain Studio with Anna Halprin in California and conducted a long term research on her dance legacy (2011-2017). In 2018, she ran a political campaign to become the mayor of the city of Krakow as a gender non-conforming witch. She is currently working on her research at Malmö Art Academy. She fled to Denmark in 2019 due to political changes in her home country, Poland.

Through the support of the Onassis ΑiR Emergency Fellowship, I will delve further into the research on queering the archives and collecting, assembling and digitizing the prolific documentation of “Lamella - the house of queer arts”. Lamella was a co-living space in 100 years-old villa in Kraków (Poland), that functioned as a think-tank for alternative notions of cultural production and sheltered local and international queer cοmmunity. I have been living and working in this house as an artist, activist and community leader, until it was shut down in 2018. After the eviction took place, notions of loss, death, grief, anger and mourning became the major area of study in my practices of choreographing rituals, installations and poetic writings. The social and political changes in my home country and violence towards trans and queer peοple forced me to search for a safe refuge in other places to continue working as an artist and researcher.