Aira Kamic

Whether or not I feel foreign depends totally on the context. Foreignness is about feeling misunderstood, a feeling that can occur anywhere.

The body is important in my life. I have always danced, and once I was contemplating trying to make dancing my career, but I dropped the idea because I did not want to reduce my body to a tool. As a professional dancer my body would constantly be competing with other bodies, and I would rarely be able to have a lazy day or drink a glass of red wine. I would lose ownership of my own body, and dancing would lose its character of being free space, and I did not want to risk this.

When dance is improvised, no-one can tell what is right or wrong. You are just a body in the room, and that is so liberating to experience in a society where the body has been reduced to a transport system for the brain.

The sick body needs our attention, even though it’s not mentioned a lot in the media, but we distance ourselves from the healthy body by exposing and optimizing it without taking time to feel it. The body has become so sexualized. It has become an object which is always given a meaning, a function. The body is either a right or a wrong body, but never allowed just to be a body. We have become poor at being naked, and that is sad, because nakedness is so natural. If you are afraid of your own body, then how can you relate to or embrace the bodies of others? Perhaps, if you were able to accept different bodies, you would also be better at accepting diversity in the broadest sense.

29 years / female / in a relationship / medical doctor / Copenhagen/ Thy / from Bosnia and Herzegovina / came to Denmark in 1993 / residence permit in 1997