‘Endless self’ is a collaboration project between Nitzan Shafran, Julie Stamm and Katarzyna Paluch, based on research about a fragmented self. We want to explore our different selfobjects, mirrored or idealized, and put these parts in a performative art installation space. Selfobjects are the experience of an event or a person as a part of oneself, rather than separate. Images of people and events that turn into "objects'' of the mind, continue to be carried by the unconscious throughout a person's life.
 

The piece is an invitation for the audience into the vast space of a self, where each object or station is fragmented yet integrated into its surroundings, in some cases only possible because of them. In the practice preceding the performance, we dismantle our own selves as an example of yet another self, to expose the infinity of its existence in the performance. The audience can choose the length of their stay with the ability to move around, as well as amount of participation. The piece is interactive and it is within our practice to invite the audience during open rehearsals.
 

Our research specific to this topic is grounded on the works of Heinz Kohut and Melanie Klein, playing also with the awareness of the limitations of their theories. One of their central claims is that the way we understand our own self is the core of our psyche and therefore to the way our brain processes phenomenological experiences, to how we interact and how we move through life. More specifically, we will try to explore and transpose different selfobjects. We will document the process through writings and exchange them amongst each other. We want to research selfobjects from three approaches: 

How the self object can be embodied, how it translates in a meeting with each other or the audience, and how we can interact with a transposed object that comes to be within a station.