Performance with Ambrita Sunshine and Mad Kate Premiere: alpha nova & galerie futura on 6 & 7 September 2023 // 19:00
photo Hanna Schaich
>>sweating together<< is a deep listening experience, duet and discussion-performance that explores the affective and emotional experience of performing work—where work is the labor of care, the labor of survival and the labor of creativity.
Ambrita Sunshine and Mad Kate present a movement dialogue embodying their own somatic discomfort in work and in relation to work. Utilising and celebrating the release of Mad Kate’s EP “SWEAT Kumasi,” a sound work composed from interviews and atmospheres about the topic of labour, they invite the audience not only to witness, but to dialogue as co-conspirators and empaths who may relate as oppositional, as the same, or as something inbetween.
As (always already) racialized, classed and sexualized bodies, we do not sweat alone, we sweat with each other, we sweat beside and in relation to each other. We sweat because it is uncomfortable what can be found there. We sweat together because we work (on being together). We sweat together because the dialogue is difficult. We sweat.
TEAM
Performers: Ambrita Sunshine and Mad Kate Dramaturgy: Rebecca Ajnwojner Sound Design: Mad Kate Photography and Videography: Hanna Schaich Lights and Sound Technician: Adrienne Teicher Production Assistant: Dana Tucker
PHOTO GALLERY
gefördert von Musikfonds / funded with support from Musikfonds
With generous support – Prozessförderung – from the #TakeHeart of Fonds Darstellende Künste in the context of NEUSTART KULTUR – Peaches and Clusterfuck were involved in an intensive process during the Autumn of 2022 to learn from each others’ practices and deepen our knowledge of our work together. Thanks to Callie’s for the space.
SystemFailed deals with structures of power in the “smart” age. Algorithmic governance techniques are made playfully tangible and a critical examination of digitalization is initiated. Three performers and a self-developed AI system, represented by moving light and projections, face the audience.
The project is divided into three modules: SystemFailed:exploration – the technical development SystemFailed:exchange – the workshop SystemFailed:experience – the performance
Text: Mel Y. Chen “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect” Next Sessions:
Monday 4 July 2022 at 16:30 – Hopscotch Auxiliary Room (Gerichtstrasse 45, Berlin) and online Monday 11 July 2022 at 16:30 – Hopscotch Auxiliary Room (Gerichtstrasse 45, Berlin) and online
Join us as we read Mel Y. Chen “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect”.
ABOUT THE TEXT
“In Animacies, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal.”
OUR APPROACH
READING AND DISCUSSING TOGETHER. This reading group is especially oriented towards reading together rather than reading outside the group. We hope that this close reading strategy can be a small act of resistance against the cultural colonization of Western academia, the hegemony of English, and the codified distinctions between the academic and the “non-academic” or the artist. There is no commitment to join for more than one session. Non academics who want to involve critical theory in their work but normally don’t have access to text based resources or the time to do research are encouraged to take part. We also make space for defining and translating words for non-native speakers who don’t have access to translations into their home language(s).
WHAT WE EXPLORE
ART AND EXTRACTIVISM investigates how extractive processes (environmental, intellectual, and physical) are replicated within the performing and in particular the sonic arts. The concept of extractivism situates all kinds of “innocent practices” as carrying the potential for exploitation and harm. We use extractivism in order to problematise a number of related phenomena—from the environmental extracation of minerals, gas and water from the ground, we expand to include the extraction of (creative) labour from (precarious) bodies, the recording of sounds, words, ideas and images from sentient beings, as well as the “mining of the exotic” in terms of content branding and other new economies from our very selves.
ART AND EXTRACTIVISM explores the following questions: What are the problematics of extraction which appear within (always-already) hierarchical collaborations? How can processes compromised by extractive dynamics resist extraction? How can we name them, rather than erase them? What are the limitations of the extractivist framework? Are there other ways of finding reciprocal relations between artists, subjects, and nature?
ART AND EXTRACTIVISM itself should resist extractivist practices by reaching towards collective practice, whereby each member chooses one text (one chapter or short text selection) that they feel could shed light on the topic. We will read the text together, rather than outside of the group, and discuss the text within the meeting time. Since it is assumed that members of the group are not supported financially to spend time researching, or in general supported by arts or academic institutions, the group aims towards generating conversation and thought that can be useful towards our work and not become extractive labour.
To that end, ART AND EXTRACTIVISM is also geared towards non-academics who wish to involve critical theory in their work. The idea of the group is to provide a safe space to discuss critical theory outside of established spheres of audibility (i.e., the academic classroom) and to create an environment where those who generally think of themselves as non-academics can interact with critical theory without the pressure of competing or keeping up with others’ knowledges. We will work towards establishing dialogue amongst artists and workers who would like to engage with some of the body of academic work which has been done “about” the worker or the artist, and see how we can relate it to our everyday and real world experiences. In this sense we attempt to resist the extractivist practice that theory engages on the body of the worker or artist.
RESOURCES
SOME OF THE BOOKS that we are reading include:
Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism – Martin Arboleda
The Burnout Society – Byung-Chul Han
Freedom, Justice and Decolonization – Lewis R. Gordon
Sylvia Winter: On Being Human as Praxis – Katherine McKittrick, Editor
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect – Mel Y. Chen
The Promise of Happiness – Sarah Ahmed
Hunting&Collecting – Sammy Baloji
On the Post Colony – Achille Mbembe
Necropolitics – Achille Mbembe
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None – Kathryn Yusoff
On Inhumanity – David Livingstone Smith
Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements – Julietta Singh
Imperial Mud – James Boyce
Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador – Thea Riofrancos
On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis – Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh
The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives – Macarena Gómez-Barris
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World – Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
HYENAZ (Mad Kate and Adrienne Teicher) are currently engaged in a series of discussions and close reading groups, a continuation of the research for their audio-visual work and performative intervention EXTRACTION, the fifth in their “Foreign Bodies” project. Extraction explores how extractive processes are replicated within the arts, and how we can find ways to resist and mediate those processes. The initial research phase of this project began in June 2021 and was generously funded by Fonds Darstellende Künste. More information about their process can be found here.
The project began with our field work in a rock quarry in Apricena, Italy, where we gathered sounds, images and writing. This scar in the earth – both beautiful and disturbing – illuminated our role as artists in a society structured by extractive forms of capitalism. To develop a performative response, we will focus on accountability practices and proactive techniques to resist extractivist practices—especially looking inwards at the way in which gathering sound can be fundamentally extractive.
The concept of extraction situates all kinds of “innocent practices” as carrying the potential for exploitation and harm. We use extraction as metasignifier—we include the extraction of (creative) labour from (precarious) bodies, minerals, gas and water from the ground, sounds, words and images from sentient beings, as well as the “mining of the exotic” from our very selves. In response we ask: What are the problematics of extraction which appear within (always-already) hierarchical collaborations? How can processes compromised by extractive dynamics resist extraction? How can we name them, rather than erase them? What are the limitations of the extractivist framework? Are there other ways of finding reciprocal relations between artists, subjects, and nature?
We want to especially thank Donato, Maria-Teresa and the community in and around Apricena, Italy.
Signals is a work by HYENAZ created for DC Sound Scene Festival’s 2021 theme EMERGE, with support from Goethe-Institut DC. Signals explores the notion of performativity in codes, signs, drag, languages, knowledges and masks that allow ((some)) bodies to emerge as visible.
Signals are methods of translation, channels through which some voices become audible and understood. Bodies emerge into forms which are recognized and codified; modes through which some bodies can be understood and called into subjectivity. An audio work and a video essay, Signals explores the process of emergence especially as it relates to the a/Artist into cultural spaces of power, those who hold or desire to hold the microphone. Using multiple distinct voices and perspectives, both sung and written.
What is the process of emergence, through which some bodies become visible and audible? Who stands at the gate? What is gained and lost in this process?
HYENAZ create all their sound works from original field recordings; the particular context for these recordings were an anarcha-feminist anti-military conference which brought together activists from throughout and beyond eastern Europe and central Asia. Together the members of the conference struggled to bridge knowledges, contexts and experiences. HYENAZ want to especially thank the voices and brave activists who were present there.
Signals is part of HYENAZ Foreign Bodies Series, a slow movement journey and process of creating audio visual works which respond to the control, management, resistance and relational positions of bodies to each other.
Bondage, Discipline, Submission & Domination, Sadism & Masochism: a classic among the Pornfilmfestival shorts programs. This year for the first time with Japanese Shibari bondage by Mistresses Hinako and Kinako and their passive male puppets.
Atrophy Portraits III, Four Chambers, UK 2020, 16 min, engl. OV Subspace, Matt Lambert, DE 2020, 20 min, engl. OV Hold, Marit Östberg, DE/SE 2021, 14 min, engl. OV Click, Charlie Forrest, UK 2020, 6 min, engl. OV + engl. UT Waiting, Morgana Meyer, IT 2021, 1 min, no dialgue You Are Not Doing Hard, Ksenia Neph, DE/RU 2021, 12 min, engl. OV + engl. UT Tatami, Katie Kinako, JP 2019, 25 min, jap.OV + engl. UT
Östberg and her crew are incredibly intelligent people who have some fascinating ideas about the politics of pornography. But even though their ideas spring from queer feminism, the issues that they tackle through their trade extend far into general gender identity issues, and for anyone vaguely interested in this area will find what they have to say incredibly enlightening.
– James Waywood, SosoGay.com
“inspiring in their commitment to making work that has a political agenda and through their articulate interviews present a reflexive and motivated feminist community in action.”
– Nazmia Jamal, Bfi.uk.org
Selected Festival History
Schwules Museum, Berlin
Warehous9, Feminists in Space – international feminist performance art festival, Copenhagen
Copenhagen Queer Festival
London LGBT Film festival
Cine y Sexo – La Mirada Feminina, Mexico City
Filmhuset, Symposium Queer Vulnerabilities, Stockholm
Teater tribunalen, Festival Två veckor i maj, Stockholm
