Oscillo-battant

Debbie Alagen’s artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of text, gesture, and lived space, as a continual attempt to reveal the poetic dimension of the everyday and to open cracks in normative representations of identity, gender, and memory. In the performance Oscillo-Battant, where the body reads while mimicking boxing movements—a sport of confrontation, defense, and survival—Debbie stages intimacy, turning speech into something physical, rhythmic, almost struck. This dialogue between language and movement expresses a constant tension between belonging and imbalance, between internal retreat and public exposure, between wound and resilience.

Debbie Alagen interlaces autobiographical and esoteric texts with a physical grammar, a rhythmic and jarring gestural language that brings forth a poetics of the body in struggle. The body reads, mimes, absorbs. It becomes narrative. It embodies the constant tension between vulnerability and strength, between poetic interiority and physical externalization. In Oscillo-Battant, sliding steps, punches thrown into the void, or choreographed hesitations become living punctuation—commas, sighs, screams—in a performed text where the intimate and the collective confront one another without separating.

The use of gestures borrowed from combat sports, alongside choreography that borders on dance, evokes the history of physical practices as spaces of expression, survival, and integration for marginalized communities. These gestures, far from neutral, carry a social and political memory: that of relegated bodies which, through effort, rhythm, and repetition, reclaim a place in public space.

In this performative space inhabited by voice, memory, and rhythm, the narrative becomes ritual, and the stage a site of identity reclamation. Themes of belonging, uprooting, and familial heritage run through the practice not as fixed discourse, but as embodied tremors. The body is offered both as archive and weapon—combative and offensive, yet vulnerable.

Debbie Alagen writes from the margins—social, emotional—to transform them into the center. Through a “hauntology of the future” and a repertoire drawn from pop culture, they bring forth absences, silences, and persistent figures that haunt the present. In this work, every movement becomes a way to ask questions: Where does the body begin? Where does memory end? How do we say the unspeakable? And how do we fight silence?

Far from standardized narratives and polished formats, Debbie’s performance embraces disturbance, fragmented language, and raw movement. They often write on their phone, capturing the flux of reality from within the everyday, assembling and disassembling fragments of self, traces, objects, words. In doing so, performance becomes a space to inhabit differently—a territory for affirmation, displacement, reinvention.