performative story-writing and role-play sessions
A Mutant, A Migrant, and A Sick Girl* unfolds as a series of performative writing sessions, taking place both as in-person sessions led by Nadja Kračunović and as a home method that anyone can try alone, with friends, strangers, or lovers. Participants are invited to share their writing at sickgirlstrategies(at)proton.de, where it may also be published on the website. Below, you will find the concept and the home method. To read the stories and notes that have already been shared, please search for the A MUTANT, A MIGRANT, AND A SICK GIRL* category within the SG*S blog.
‘’Professionals bring their personal suffering into their work, and ill people discover forms of vocation in illness. The wounded storyteller, ending silences, speaking truths, creating communities, becomes a wounded healer.’’
A.W.Frank, Wounded Storyteller
The title A Mutant, a Migrant, and a Sick Girl hints at a story that unfolds through multiplicity beyond ableist, heteropatriarchal epistemology. How does it evolve? Does it ever end? Is it tragic, or freaking funny? What is the geography? Is it relatable or relational? How do these three positions respond to our cognitive and political experience of now? Are they short stories, prayers, mantras, cultural clashes, news, toolkits, stand-up sets, or restaurant menus?
A Mutant is a figure of transformation and refusal. They exceed stable categories of body, gender, species, and logic. Mutation here is not a deficit but an excess: too much, too fluid, too unpredictable to be contained. The Mutant embodies becoming rather than being and is always happening.
A Migrant is shaped by movement – across borders, languages, systems, and identities. This position holds displacement, translation, and negotiation. It is not only about geography, but about navigating structures that never fully accommodate you.
A Sick Girl* reclaims vulnerability, dependency, and chronicity as sites of knowledge and resistance. She disrupts narratives of productivity, cure, and linear time. The asterisk opens her beyond a fixed identity toward a collective experience.
The first sessions of writing workshops took place in April 2026 in the Casino for Social Medicine https://casinoooo.org/ in Berlin. If you are in Berlin, do not miss this anarchist, activist, heart-warming space.
Home Method
Core principle: Shift from representation to material conditions of bodies. From “What is the story about?” to “What does this body have to endure, translate, refuse, or become?”
distort
enter
merge
come back
explode
discuss
Goal is: reclaim vulnerability, dependency, chronicity as knowledge and resistance.
Positions are:
- individual AND collective
- political (not gendered identities) – queer / trans / nonbinary / migrating / mutating bodies
- they are & they produce poetry / prose / survival manuals / body fluids / documents / crisis / care / futures / pain / etc.
Rules
- It can live with you, inside/outside of you — one or all positions
- It can inspire, provoke, affect emotionally (joy/sadness/anger/etc.)
- You can be observer AND protagonist
Exercise 1 — Word Mapping
Answer freely (no right/wrong).
One or multiple positions in mind.
- Where does it live in your body?
- Where does it leak?
- Where does it go numb?
- What does it carry all the time?
- What is too heavy to carry?
- What does it have to prove?
- To whom / how often?
- What is always questioned?
- What is never questioned?
- What does it repeat?
- What does it translate constantly?
- What gets lost?
- What is denied?
- What does it take anyway?
- When is it visible / invisible?
- What system does it depend on / break?
- What does it endure quietly?
- What makes it snap?
- What does it refuse / what refuses it?
- When does it become something else? What does it become?
- Is it legible / believed / tolerated?
- Who benefits? Who is threatened?
Exercise 2 — Mini Character CV
Write:
- short self-introduction
- factual fragments
- notes / symptoms / systems / memories
Form:
- statement
- notes
- biography fragment
- list / refusal / report
Duration: ~5 min per character
Exercise 3 — Prompts: Situation Cards
Draw a situation (from a hat / random selection) and respond from one chosen position.
- Ausländerbehörde (International Office)
- Family lunch
- Airport security
- Emergency room
- Pharmacy
- Job interview
- Apocalypse
- Doctor appointment
- Rental viewing
- Bank appointment
- Public transport delay
- Dinner small talk
- Border control
- Protest
- Revolution
- Visa deadline
Exercise 4 — Group Writing (Character Collision)
You can try it with a friend (many of them), with comrades, colleagues, lovers or strangers.
Process:
- draw new situation card
- combine with previous writing
- merge / cut / rewrite / invent
Decide:
- which character belongs to whom
- can characters multiply? collapse? overlap?
- what is the collective story?
Format
- dialogue
- monologue
- protest speech
- prayer / mantra
- news / report
- stand-up / joke
- toolkit / manual
- restaurant menu
- fragmented scenes
Presentation
- groups perform collective text
- decide performative structure (together / split / simultaneous / sequential)
- body placement is part of composition
- title stays as skeleton (can be slightly altered if needed)
Sharing/Feedback
If you want to share your text, reflections, or fragments from this process, you can write to:
si****************@****on.de