Zuzana Zabkova

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Czech Republic, Germany (residence), Slovakia (citizenship) °1987
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Zuzana Žabková (1987, Košice) is an artist, dancer, and choreographer who explores the body as a prophetic apparatus, always in touch with something beyond itself. In her work, she often starts from a place of wounds, weakness and dysfunctionality, embracing these as holy strategies for survival. She is interested in somatic fiction and collective play structures that serve as laboratories for imagining and training new forms of social relations. She works both independently and collaboratively, rethinking values around work and care. She is the co-founder of björnsonova, a platform, fictional character, community, and multifaceted dance form with roots and connections spanning various temporal, spatial, and artistic dimensions. Zuzana holds an MA from the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Faculty of Visual Arts in Brno. She lives and works between Frankfurt am Main and Prague.

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    Great Sweetness (last edited: 2026) author(s): Zuzana Zabkova This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    Great Sweetness is a written companion of the artistic research project Night of Dark Angels, which investigates how erotic mysticism, queer vampire narratives, and somatic performance can function as modes of embodied knowledge. The text explores “great sweetness” as a recurring motif in hagiographic writings of mystics and in queer vampire literature, where ecstatic pleasure, abjection, and desire exceed normative frameworks of sexuality, subjectivity, and transcendence. Drawing on Lacanian jouissance and Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, the research approaches great sweetness as an excessive affective state—simultaneously pleasurable and disturbing—that destabilizes boundaries between self and other, sacred and profane, human and non-human. Methodologically, the text operates through a situated, phenomenological, and autoethnographic approach, treating writing not as representation but as a performative practice that accompanies and informs artistic experimentation. Great Sweetness functions as a conceptual and affective archive that feeds directly into the development of experimental somatic LARP (Live Action Role Play) scores within Night of Dark Angels. This LARP experiment translates textual research into collective, embodied situations, where figures of mystics and queer vampires are enacted as tools for exploring vulnerability, monstrosity, care, and resistance. Rather than aiming at theoretical closure, the text proposes great sweetness as a mode of embodied thinking—one that foregrounds process, relationality, and affect, and that opens artistic research toward antifascist, feminist, and queer forms of collective imagination and practice.
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