Chronic Illness teasers 2016-2026
Chronic Illness is a performance art space and theatre entity operating for the last decade from a bio-contaminated sewage in Holloway, North London. Here, Chronic Illness event series is a site-specific project interrogating fungoid life forms that inhabit the space. Performative interventions are considered acts of probing of the non-human environment, as they become part of internal processes of the monstrous body. Chronic Illness Theatre sources its primal inspiration from the environmental media of fungi and develops a method of performance art driven by their dark vitalism.
In their shows, Chronic Illness Theatre embodies themes of vegetative life cognition, bodily fluid medicine, organ transplant, monstrous digestion, cataclysmic climate change, paranoid corporeal mutations, post-Internet body dysmorphia, eroticism of rot, trans-digital material decompositions, excremental animism, cannibalism, addictive insatiability, industrial genocide, dark vitalism behind communication media, chimerical bio-fantasies, human waste and displacement, excess physiology repressed by modern tech design, bio-punk.
Chronic Illness has been conceived and curated by Piotr Bockowski, who is also the creative director behind its theatre, which involves invasive actions, immersive multimedia environments, movement sculptures or bioart installations.
During the first decade of Chronic Illness its performances were hosted by events in Berlin, Poznan, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Valencia, Consenza, Barcelona, Sofia and Belgrade.
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Piotr BockowskiDirector
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Project Type:Experimental
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Runtime:13 minutes 30 seconds
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
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Digital Cinema Package:Unavailable
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Chronic Illness BelgradeBelgrade
Serbia
June 12, 2026
Dr Piotr Bockowski, aka fung neo, is a London based philosopher of posthumanities, body performer and video artist. A curator of Chronic Illness events at a biocontaminated sewage space, he has performed and shown his work in Europe, China, USA, Canada & Japan. Director of short films: ‘Bottom of the Well’, ‘Ogled’, ‘Ancestor Parasite’, ‘Nekama’, ‘Gunkanjima’ & ‘Invert Balcony’. He taught media theory at London universities, including Goldsmiths (University of London) & LCC (UAL), as well as as a guest lecturer at Kingston University. Author of philosophy and SF books: ‘Fungi Media’ (Open Humanities Press), ‘Feed the Hole’, ‘Nekama’ and ‘Escape is a Trap’. His art criticism and speculative fictions have been published in CLOT, Inertia, Mousai, Guts and Posthuman Magazine.
During the last two decades he performed about two hundred times, mostly in London but also other European capitals. Previously, he was animating ‘Phantom Limbs’ event series in China, creating body-media performance shows in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong & Lijiang. His video practice includes pieces: ‘Gunkanjima’ (Japan/UK 2011), ‘Voodoo in the Afternoon’ (UK/China 2013) , ‘Oracle’ (China 2014), ‘Nekama’ (China/USA 2015), ‘Ancestor Parasite’ (UK 2019), ‘Bottom of the Well’ (UK 2021), ‘Indochina Jungle’ (Viet/UK 2023) and ‘Ogled’ (UK 2024), internationally presented during over hundred screenings at film festivals and media art events.
Two major Chronic Illness films are coming out in 2026: 'Invert Balcony' & 'Office Wet Tech' both under direction of Piotr Bockowski.
