Konkvistakon (The Conquistacon) is a theatre you build when you cannot afford to mourn. It is the dramaturgy of empire disguised as spectacle, a funeral in the guise of a celebration. It is the silence of the conquered transformed into a soundscape. It is an anti-mourning apparatus – a ritual, ideology, and mode of performance that transforms death into raw material, territory, or symbolic capital.
It does not speak on behalf of the dead. It speaks only against the systems that dictate their absence. It does not simulate real tragedies. Instead, it maps the dramaturgy of conquest, domination, and curated historical consciousness as manifested in political aesthetics. It does not exist in the future or in fantasy, but in the cracks of the present — in media releases, in museums, military ceremonies, command centres, art biennials, and theatricalized regimes that distort human grief, erase complicity, and glorify violence as a "necessity."
The conceptual framework of the performance Konkvistakon, based on the play Osvajalec (The Conqueror) by Andrej Hieng, blends ideas of "necropolitics" by Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe with Slovenian dramaturge, editor, and writer Petra Pogorevc’s "theatre of mourning".
The dramaturgical principles of Konkvistakon::
1. Real death must be aestheticized, not mourned.
Blood is pigment, corpses are iconography.
2. The conqueror is always the protagonist.
All narratives are subject to the logic of victory.
3. The conquered can speak—but only in translation.
Meanings are lost, emotional registers flattened.
4. Defeat is portrayed as victory.
Sadness becomes advertising. Human tissue permeates the landscape like artworks.
5. The past is raw material, not history.
Memories are mined, not preserved.
6. The audience's empathy is directed towards the dominators, not towards mourning.
Suffering is shown, but not humanized.
7. Death is not the end, but an event of transformation.
It is processed into values: economic, symbolic, strategic.
8. Violence must be spectacular, but never real.
It is present everywhere, but never close enough to be smelled.
9. Absence is a special effect.
Entire nations, countries, or languages can disappear – but their disappearance is merely a scenographic intervention.
10. Death is political only when it benefits the living.
Necropolitical calculations determine who is visible in death, who is silenced, and whom we mourn.
The Conquistacon (Konkvistakon)
14,00 EUR
12,00 EUR * * EUR for younger than 25 and older than 65, as well as pensioners.
Foto: Kristina Bursać
Foto: Kristina Bursać
Foto: Kristina Bursać
Foto: Kristina Bursać
Foto: Kristina Bursać
Foto: Kristina Bursać
Foto: Claudi Sovre
Foto: Claudi Sovre
Foto: Claudi Sovre
Foto: Claudi Sovre
Directed by: Aljoša Živadinov Zupančič
Dramaturg: Nika Korenjak
Costume Designer: Claudi Sovre
Set designer: Dunja Zupančič
Projection Designer: Gregor Mesec
Lighting Designer: Janez Kocjan
Music: pl@ža
Performed by: Gal Oblak, Peter Alojz Marn, Jožica Avbelj, Ajda Kostevc
Co-production: Zavod Delak, Cankarjev dom
Founder and main co-funder of Cankarjev dom’s Arts and Culture programme
