sex/uality. work. extraction. art. theatr/ics
“There’s power in being able to just be who you are on the stage, behind the stage, to others, and especially to yourself. Not having to veil yourself, I think that is ultimate freedom. And what fascism and authoritarianism does, and censorship around the body and sexuality especially, is to cut us off from what we know and our own knowledge about ourselves. What feels good? What is pleasure?”
APRIL 2025
S4E4 with Kim Ye
This month’s conversation is with multidisciplinary artist Kim Ye. Ye is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses performance, video, installation, text, and social engagement. Inserting herself into popular cultural forms, Ye interrogates gendered constructs shaping perceptions of power, labor, and taboo. Presenting bodies as both sites of domination and liberation, her work describes the entanglement between private desire and fantasy, and public discourse and ideology. Through shifting performance contexts, she reinterprets the forces that enforce and reproduce normativity.
In 2023-2024, Ye was a Mellon Arts Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and a California Arts Council Creative Corps Fellow. Her work has been funded by the California Arts Council (USA), The National Endowment for the Arts (USA), Foundation for Contemporary Art (USA), Mellon Foundation (USA), and The Australia Council for the Arts (Australia). Her work has been presented at The Getty, MOCA, Guggenheim Gallery, Wattis Institute, Hammer Museum, Banff Center for Arts, Material Art Fair, and Frieze Film Seoul, among others. Ye received her MFA from UCLA in 2012, and was a full-time visiting faculty in the Photography & Media program at CalArts from 2022-2025. Ye has worked professionally as a dominatrix since 2011, and has serves as Co-director of Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOPLA since 2019).
“I was thinking about the idea of return as the antidote to exile. And then, of course, the return doesn’t become about a physical space, but a return to who we are, which is our job to find out, who are we, really?”
MARCH 2025
S4E3 with Awadalla
This month’s conversation is with writer and transdisciplinary artist Awadalla. Their work spans text, performance, and visual storytelling, reimagining how life and knowledge are shaped through queer and decolonial praxis. Alongside their creative practice, Awadalla works at the intersection of mental and sexual health as a practitioner and educator. They founded Decolonizing Sexual Health, an initiative challenging dominant sexual health narratives through lived experience, pleasure, and collective care.
“what happened when I found the drums is that all of that sensation that I found poetry could produce inside my body, sort of emotionally, psychologically, I all of a sudden was able to express with my entire body. So my arms and my legs became–what do I say– like capillaries or veins where the blood would be rushing through when I was reading poetry, and I would feel that excited sensation. But instead of just feeling it inside my body and holding it there, through taiko, I could find that I could express it outside my body for other people in a way that writing poems themselves didn’t do.”
FEBRUARY 2025
S4E3 with Kaz Falkenstrom
This month’s guest on S.W.E.A.T. is Kaz Falkenstrom—a poet, drummer, and arts activist whose work has left a lasting impact on Tucson, Arizona’s literary and cultural landscape. Kaz has played a vital role in shaping the city’s arts scene, directing the Tucson Poetry Festival, co-founding Kore Press, and creating spaces for women’s voices in publishing. In 2002, she co-founded Odaiko Sonora, dedicating much of her life to the art of taiko drumming. This conversation was recorded in person during a visit to the Sonoran Desert in January.
A queer Korean-Norwegian transplant from Virginia to Arizona, Kaz shares how the somatic practices of writing and drumming shape creative expression through movement and rhythm. This episode delves into the complexities of learning another culture’s art form, particularly her relationship to taiko as a Korean-American artist, and the fine line between appropriation, lineage, and respect. The discussion also explores the power of silence and stillness, and the balance between creating space for others and stepping forward for oneself. Finally, Kaz reflects on mastery vs. obsession, selflessness vs. selfishness, and what it truly means to dedicate oneself to a craft.
“I think that there is a lot to be said for highlighting the commonalities between certain trans experiences and those of non-trans people. Because the far right has a vested interest in making us seem like we’re particularly different to other people.”
Photo credit Mayra Wallraff
JANUARY 2025
S4E1 with Olympia Bukkakis
Thrilled to be opening season 4 of S.W.E.A.T. with Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, Olympia Bukkakis. Olympia is a drag queen, choreographer, moderator, and writer living and working in Berlin. She is inspired by the tensions and intersections between queer nightlife and contemporary dance and performance. She is a founding member of D.R.A.G. (drag resources action group), who are organising for better working standards for drag and nightlife performers.
In this episode, we explore the question of: What is performance? Olympia redefines it as “existing on purpose for a discrete period of time” and reflects on how drag blurs the boundaries of ritual and identity. The complex relationship between transness and drag, and how drag serves as both a tool for self-discovery and a ceremonial act. We also discuss the realities of queer nightlife and drag performance, from the physical dangers performers face just getting to work to the financial precarity of the industry, and how the Drag Resources Action Group (DRAG Berlin) is fighting to establish fair pay, safety measures, and rehearsal spaces for performers.
“Why do these people generate very hard stuff like weapons, for what? Weapons for what? For animals? Animals also have rights. You cannot just kill animals like this. For what? For the nature? Nature, you cannot destroy nature because you have to live in the nature. For whom? Who is your enemy to build this very big thing? Why these big tanks–for what? Of course for the human being. And why do we now say, Palestine or Ukraine or Sudan? Because people are drawing the battlefield for that. So we must fight. And the fight is not just going to end today.”
Photo credit Kathryn Fischer
DECEMBER 2024
S3E12 with Napuli Paul Langa
This months conversation is with Sudanese human rights activist and refugee rights activist Napuli Paul Langa.
Napuli Paul Langa is a human rights activist who worked for the Sudanese Organization for Nonviolence and Development (SONAD), and is active in the Refugee Movement in Berlin, Germany, who have fought to maintain their place at Orianienplatz since 2013.
Napoli shared her incredible journey from their activism in Sudan to their critical role in the refugee movement at Berlin’s Oranienplatz, where they famously occupied a tree to resist eviction.
We delved into the challenges refugees face, including systemic racism, colonization, and societal dehumanization, and how Napoli channels her experiences into both activism and artistry. She reflected on her efforts to secure basic rights like the freedom to move, work, and live with dignity, while challenging global inequalities and Western exploitation.
“I think there’s something very strange about work in our society where people who do the least get the most rewards and the higher status. People who do things that are bad for the world or other people get the most rewarded, and people who do the most useful things, like picking up the trash in the street, are regarded as having no value.”
Photo credit Olcan Akçay.
NOVEMBER 2024
S3E11 with Nadia Says
This months conversation is with educator, organizer and curator Nadia Says.
Nadia is the co-founder of creative freelancer platform Your Mom’s Agency and inclusivity advocacy network dif eV. She is also an educator, journalist, and consultant in the fields of culture, music business, music tech, and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). Mostly based in Berlin, Nadia has connections to the creative scenes of Beirut, Marseilles, Detroit, and Los Angeles.
Read her latest article for MixMag about the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices, in Berlin and make sure to check Soli Tunes on Bandcamp exclusive. Your Mom’s lends its Bandcamp platform to release a new multi-genre compilation, featuring twelve collaborations of music and visual art by over forty artists who came in solidarity to advocate for Palestinian art, be it music or tatreez embroidery. All proceeds will be donated to a Palestine-based composition and recording studio. They will announce the result of our collection in February 2025. Discover the first six tracks from November 1st, and the next six tracks from December 6th.
“Dass wir erst mal irgendwie lernen, irgendwie wieder Nein zu sagen–Das ist eigentlich das, was wir als Künstler in unseren Ebenen einfach auch machen können. Nicht einfach mitzumachen … Nein zum Krieg zu sagen, Nein zu den Waffen zu sagen. Und daran noch so ein Ja zum Frieden.”
(That we first learn, somehow, to say no again–That’s actually what we as artists on our levels can do. Not just going along with it … Saying no to war, saying no to weapons. And then adding a yes to peace.)
OCTOBER 2024
S3E10 with John Herman
This months conversation is with self-taught art-activist John Herman.
John artistically explores themes of war and peace, visual sociology, and socio-political communication across a rich variety of media—from performances, to video installations, to photography—yet John Herman cryptically resists the title of “artist”.
His practice is fed by his extreme experiences of war, when he was fighting as a volunteer soldier alongside global freedom movements in Africa and the Middle East. In the Global Music market, he has worked as an artist manager, tour manager and a curator for World Music concert series focused on the Middle East, were he lived for a decade.
We chose to conduct our conversation in both English and German. The podcast this month can be heard in both original German or with a translation.
“Capital is always opposed to life. Life is a different value system–it’s diametrically opposed to capital. Capital thrives by colonizing life. And so by attacking directly, the money of hegemonic capitalism today, which is the U.S. dollar, I argue that we can change the rules and make a system that allows for the caring of life, specifically through debt cancelation and the basic income. ”
SEPTEMBER 2024
S3E9 with Julio Linares
This months conversation is with author, activist and economic anthropologist Julio Linares
Julio Linares is an economic anthropologist born in the territorios known today as Guatemala. In the last 13 years, he has been a migrant in Taiwan, the UK and Germany. Since 2018, he has served as Public Outreach for the Basic Income Earth Network. His first book “Decolonizing Money” (Pluto Press, 2025) argues for the abolition of the US Dollar as a means to transform the distribution of wealth and power in the planet, in order to bring forth a social ecological just transition. He enjoys giving and receiving massages and doing joyful anarchist resistance across social movements. He is currently based in Berlin.
“You can’t talk about property rights if you don’t talk about slavery … if you don’t understand that history and what that has meant for the understanding of capital development and who has and who has not, then you will not understand this tremendous debt that is owed to those sons and daughters of enslaved people and indigenous people to look at indigenous peoples lands and how indigenous people were demonized, were driven off, eliminated with all of these broken treaties. If you don’t understand that as a foundation … how can we change it? It’s not equal.”
AUGUST 2024
S3E8 with Dr. Shelley Wong
This months conversation is with Dr. Shelley Wong, Professor Emeritus at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia in Multilingual/Multicultural Education. Her research interests include womanist, Critical Race and interfaith perspectives on justice, peace and reconciliation; dialogic inquiry, socio-cultural approaches to literacy, and critical multiculturalism.
Dr. Wong is co-editor with Ilham Nasser and Lawrence N. Berlin of Examining education, media and dialogue under occupation: The case of Palestine and Israel. Bristol, U.K.: Multilingual Matters. She is also co-editor with Elaisa Sánchez-Gosnell, Anne Marie Foerster-Lu, & Lori Dodson of (2018) Teachers as Allies: Transformative Practices for Teaching DREAMers and Undocumented Students. New York: Teachers College Press.
We met up together to attend the July 24th in Washington DC, when thousands of demonstrators gathered to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States and his joint address made in Congress. In todays show I also took the opportunity to talk to various demonstrators about how their work dovetails with their activism and their choice to be at the protest, so youll hear various voices of resistance throughout the show.
“I do not like that people continue to call me mother at this moment, because this word is charged with so many responsibilities which are extremely violent. Maternity, especially in a Colombian context, comes with a lot of violence. But what I do like is to guide people, to teach, to share and to guide the processes of very young people and teenagers. For me, that’s of huge value.”
JULY 2024
S3E7 with Demonia Yeguaza
This months conversation is with Demonia Yeguaza, an activist, performer, and dancer specializing in subversive, contemporary, and voguing dance. From a young age, Demonia’s path has been one of self-discovery and resilience. Through the transformative power of dance, she has navigated the complexities of identity and expression. Her artistic journey is marked by a deep commitment to understanding and embodying her true self, constructing her identity through every movement and performance.
Demonia is the Mother of the House of Yeguazas, a cornerstone of the Colombian Ballroom scene and a transdisciplinary artist collective. In addition to her work with the House of Yeguazas, Demonia is the director of Frente de Resistencia Marica. This organization is dedicated to advocating for the creation and implementation of safe spaces and differential public policies for the LGBTIQ+ community. Through her activism, Demonia fights for the rights and recognition of marginalized communities, using her platform to amplify their voices and demands.
As an artivist, Demonia strives to put her work in dialogue with everyday life, society, and public spaces. She believes that art should leave places of privilege, occupy other social spheres, and reach more communities.
We are joined by Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Pateau who helped with translation
“to listen to marginalized voices in June 2024 is not enough. And to be learning and doing nothing is not enough. You have to also learn to buckle up, and show up and fight the fight alongside the people”
JUNE 2024
S3E6 with Tereza Silon
This months conversation is with interdisciplinary artist Tereza Silon
S.W.E.A.T.
Tereza Silon (ona/její, they/them, none), born 1991 in former Czechoslovakia, is an interdisciplinary artist, a performer, performance researcher, poet, experimental herbalist and a bodyworker. their work is often informed by the vegetal and (more-than-)human intimacies, by herbalist practices, vegetal lores, the need of inherent sensuousness of subjective embodiments with/in the world. they feel through feminist queer perspectives, social-natural ecologies and a desire to open spaces for generative intimacy/ies despite extractive systems we are forced to inhabit.
As an (ex) activist, they question the balance between necessary care and engagement in prolonged palliative care for structures that need to go. they are currently working on setting up a temporary non-idealized social pleasure clinic for september, give bodywork, are writing a first ´substantial text´ aka are writing a book and are in a process with a performance titled ´good gardens´ exploring lore of the much maligned bella donna and power dynamics in gardening beyond the binary of ´good´and ´bad´. the art ´career´ gives them a chance to also work occasionally multiple nice but precarized and underpaid side jobs.
Silon centers queer as well as folkloric approaches, grassroot origins, craving for more ´useless´ beauty enhancing the experience of awe and upholding multiplicities as a form of resistance to the hegemonic world-order. their motivation is (one day soon) the right to play – for all! the dignified work of survival is not enough for a survival alone.
“for a long time those of us that work on the intersection of tax and gender were talking to ourselves. Only in the last three to four years is there a recognition of: Well, if we are going to make our rights manifest, we need to pay for them. So we need to look at the intersections of gender and feminist thinking and fiscal policy. Otherwise we aren’t really changing the structures and systems to get where we want.”
MAY 2024
S3E5 with Fariya Mohiuddin
This months conversation is with Fariya Mohiuddin.
Fariya is the Senior Program Officer, Tax and Policy (Global) at the International Budget Partnership. Since joining IBP in 2019, she has been leading the Tax Equity initiative’s regional and global work as well as providing strategic support to the Tax Equity’s in-country work across Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania.
Prior to joining IBP, Fariya was the Strategic Programs Researcher at the Tax Justice Network where she her focus was on developing a human rights, feminist, and gender equality focused network of tax activists and researchers as well as research on the link between human rights and tax justice. In this role, she was an inaugural steering committee member of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice’s Global Tax and Gender Working Group and helped lead the creation of its first strategy framework; she was also the main organizer behind the Global Convening on Women’s Rights and Tax Justice in Bogota in 2017.
Fariya has also worked with the International Centre for Tax and Development, the World Bank Group, the Ford Foundation, and Open Society Foundation on research projects on the political economy of accountability, citizen engagement and transparency in relation to taxation. She holds both a Bachelor’s of Arts (Economic and International Relations) and a Master’s of Global Affairs from the University of Toronto.