CRYSIS is a collaborative project by audiovisual artists Medina Balešić and Bea Lamadrid Bayón, created together with performer Maira Darja. The work is presented as a video in which movement, sound, and moving image interact to investigate how identity is shaped through the body and how memories, emotions, and experiences can be shared between people. The artistic process has been central to the work, built on a close collaboration where choreography, camera, sound, and performance developed in parallel, continually influencing one another.

The work takes its departure point in the body as a carrier of experience. Through movement, breathing, and physical exertion, it explores how past experiences can leave traces on the body and affect how we move, relate to others, and perceive ourselves. The choreography shifts between control and dissolution, resistance and change, with each movement gradually renegotiating the relationship between body, space, and time.

CRYSIS stems from experiences shared by many FLINTA* individuals – women, lesbians, intersex people, non-binary people, trans people, and agender people.

The acronym is used here as an umbrella term for groups historically and contemporarily affected by gendered and patriarchal power structures. Rather than examining individual identities, the work investigates the bodily consequences left behind by norms, gender roles, and power. Through movement, it brings to light how such experiences can manifest as repetition, tension, adaptation, and exhaustion, but also how the body can become a site for resistance, recovery, and transformation.

Although only one person appears in front of the camera, CRYSIS is built on the collective work of three people. Choreography, camerawork, and sound were developed through a shared process in which the artists continually transferred ideas, movements, and emotions back and forth. In this way, collaboration becomes not only a method for creating the piece, but also one of its central themes. The work explores how communication can occur through the body and how experiences can be shared without words.

The visual style is stripped-down. Color, light, and movement take center stage, while the environment remains open and free of explicit geographical or narrative markers. The camera closely follows the performer’s movements, allowing the rhythm of the body to dictate the pace of the image. Sound does not serve to illustrate what is happening, but functions as an independent component of the work that heightens the physical experience and the connection between body and space.

Through its interplay between performance, camera, and sound, CRYSIS examines how identity is formed in relation to others and how community can emerge through shared bodily experiences. The work creates a space to reflect on how experiences are carried forward, how they can be transformed through encounters with others, and how collective processes can open new ways of understanding both the body and the world.

Medina Balešić

Medina Balešić (b. 1994, Gothenburg, Sweden) is an artist and curator working between Gothenburg, Amsterdam and Banja Luka. Her interdisciplinary practice spans moving image, installation, sound and socially engaged methodologies. Through collaborative processes, public interventions and digital image-making, she examines how relationships are formed between people, places and collective memory.

With roots in Bosnia, Balešić approaches migration less as a subject than as a condition from which to consider belonging, memory and collective life. Working primarily with moving image, she treats editing as a conceptual methodology, bringing together montage, sound, found footage, personal archives and digital image cultures to connect personal experience with contemporary visual and political histories.

Collaboration is not simply a method of production but a central artistic material in her practice. Through dialogue and collective processes, she develops works that explore how art can generate new social relations and shared forms of imagination.

Recent works include Little Paper (2024), CRYSIS (2024), M1 (2023), and the long-term public artwork The White Cube Manifesto (2025–2026).