They will go on growing backwards

As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end,

under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards. (Kafka, 'Advocates')
 

The performance has its origin in the short story “Advocates” by Franz Kafka. In it, the narrator seeks advocates in a building, climbing a seemingly endless flight of stairs. It is in the relation of this story with the positioning of the performer in the city of Prague with the discovery of a building where the writer worked, that the action was conceived.The narrative of the performance is created from the gesture of walking a flight of stairs backwards, working with the idea of failure and absurdity of a repetitive and sisific task. Going backwards releases the action of walking from an external end. It is no longer a utilitarian or self-sufficient act, but a divergent confrontation with the building. The fact that the performer goes up the stairs on his back, violating a gesture of everyday life, is in itself an action that shows the impossibility of reaching an end (of the staircase?). Or at least having a sense of it. The performer only sees and has access to a past action, to what “has already happened”, where his body has already traveled and crossed, continuing, in a perpetual action, to climb the flights of stairs without an end in sight.