Value is a Dynamic Surplus of Every Function is an ongoing project that choreographers Marjana Krajač and Sonja Pregrad have been developing across various formats, including movement research, Skype calls, and choreographic dialogues. Microsoft retired Skype on May 5, 2025, which adds an interesting element to the context of this work. The collaboration began at an artist symposium in Zagreb, centered on the question: What is my value? – from valorization to dance. Marjana invited Sonja, who was then living in Berlin, to contribute, and they arranged a Berlin-Zagreb Skype call as a lecture-performance. Sonja explored the economic valorization of artistic production while tracing the systems of value in her work across colleagues, the artistic field, family, producers, students, critics, and friends in both Zagreb and Berlin. The mapping of the tangible and (un)thinkable investments required for artistic growth revealed values behind the work—whether aesthetic, informational, or affective. Marjana and Sonja continued to explore these topics at the Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme (France) and at the platform for improvisation research Improspekcije Festival in Zagreb (Croatia).

What can artworks generate through the conditions of their own emergence? If movement is both a subject and an object, can this produce knowledge about objectivity and subjectivity equally? This framework suggests that all objects and phenomena produce an excess, a residual information that eludes the obvious, of what it is that one is “looking at.” This excess can be only partially grasped. Its value exists beyond intention. What emerges is a surplus that cannot be subsumed into systems of evaluation. On these premises, this work generates an ongoing map of the moving body as an organizational point that amplifies divergent focuses. The work ultimately unfolds as a series of open-ended questions—questions for which no answers exist, but which remain relevant precisely within their unsolvable question–answer structure.