This month’s conversation is with LIADLAND. LIADLAND is a musician, an artist, an activist, a perpetual migrant, a queer trash diva, a Jew from Pralestine, and a master of the margins. Her music, performances, and films de-exotify and demystify positions of so-called sexual and political deviance. In them, the body and voice are used as tools of decolonial education and resistance, as platforms to display vulnerabilities, and as means to call for a revolution, celebrate life, and mourn.

Liad’s art and worldview is informed by decades of political work on intersectional issues such as sex worker rights and queer and Palestinian liberation. Her debut album, Nothing to Declare and subsequent EP, Nothing to Remix, were released in 2024. Her current music and live show focuses on collective organizing and ongoing resistance with Palestine as a starting point. Broken is her upcoming single.

Liad and Mad Kate talk about the layered realities of sex work and why the ProstSchG – Gesetz law in Germany pushed migrant sex workers further underground and out of reach of the peer networks that actually kept them safe. They talk about what community care really looks like when the system, and individuals, are exhausted and broke. And they talk about how the body becomes a political site — in performance, in sex work, in watching and/or surviving genocide. Liad talks about what she’s carrying from Palestine into her music and live shows right now, how watching a genocide from Europe has felt on her body. Finally, why she’s in the process of revoking her Israeli citizenship — and encouraging other anti-Zionist Jews to do the same.

Buy LIADLAND’s music: https://liadland.bandcamp.com/

This months conversation is with Essex raised, Berlin Based Drag performer BLEACH. Creating parties, shows & festivals, BLEACH is a central figure in the German capitals queer underground.

Starting out her career in a burlesque bar in Stockholm, she entertains with a fiery mix of punking, stripping & speeching. BLEACH is A regular host of Berlin club nights, drag shows with a loud point of view and is a punk rock star in Bleach and the Bumholes.

Against the backdrop of yet another war of aggression by the United States and Isreal against Iran and Lebanon, BLEACH and I talk about drag and nitelife performance. We discuss the role of explicit performance and how we work through the patriarchy in our own bodies. We talk about the difficult issue of payment (how to balance it against having lots of people in a backstage) in underground drag spaces (the ecology of drag), and BLEACH shares some of who her different characters are and how they were formed. Finally we discuss Bleach’s project SPAT!, which is attempting to go back to print media and DIY mailing lists to spread the word about community events rather than relying on big corporations.

My conversation this month is with queer and feminist cultural historian, educator, podcaster, and public speaker Ramzi Fawaz.

Ramzi Fawaz is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and host of the podcast “Nerd from the Future”. He is the author of two books, including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016) and Queer Forms (2022), both published by NYU Press. The New Mutants received the 2017 ASAP Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Fawaz is a contributing editor to Film Quarterly, where he writes a column titled “Imagination Unbound.” He is also a co-editor of the NYU Press book series Postmillennial Pop with Gayle Wald and Aaron Trammell. Fawaz is currently working on a new book project titled How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World. In it, he argues for a rethinking of humanities education as a form of collective psychedelic therapy, which uses literature, art, and media, rather than psychoactive medicines, to induce positive, long-term transformations in students’ mental wellbeing. As part of this project, He recently edited a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on the topic of “Psychedelic Imaginaries,” which was published in April 2025.

We talk about teaching as an act of love, psychedelics as tools for loosening rigid thought, and how imagination can help us live with difference instead of fearing it. Ramzi describes entering the classroom as a “radiant light,” grounded, joyful, and fully present with students. At the heart of his pedagogy is attention as care: treating students as people worth listening to, challenging them without shaming, and creating a “cone of trust” where risk, disagreement, and mistakes are part of learning. Ramzi shares insights from his upcoming book, How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World, arguing that both art and psychedelic experience can soften hardened thinking and help us approach human difference with curiosity rather than fear. Together we ask: How do we practice being with people we don’t agree with? How do we act when theory fails us? How do we cultivate imagination that changes the world rather than escapes it?

This month’s conversation is with musician, producer and creative technologist Sky Deep.

Sky Deep is a Berlin-based live performer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer whose work fuses raw emotion, social consciousness, and technical mastery. Born in Los Angeles and shaped by the underground scenes of New York and Berlin, she merges electronic music, live instrumentation, and performance art into electrifying, genre-defying shows.

A driving force in queer and POC visibility within electronic music, Sky founded Reclaim the Beats Festival and leads her label Reveller Records as a platform for community-driven experimentation. As MIDI-Music Director and core multi-instrumentalist for Peaches’ OOPS Tour (2020), she helped sculpt the tour’s radical live sound architecture — extending her artistry from club stages to global arenas.

Her sonic imagination also extends into film, television, and theater: she created sound design for Shu Lea Cheang’s feature UKI, served as music supervisor for Loving Her (ZDFneo), and designs sound for productions at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and other major German theaters. Every project carries her signature spirit — joyful, unapologetic, and deeply human.

My guest this month is transdisciplinary artist Isaiah Lopaz, whose work revolves around collage, photography, text, and performance. Born in occupied Tongvaland to a working class African American family, Lopaz is a descendent of Igbo / West African / Geechee / African American / First Nations peoples. His work frequently focuses on tracing where histories often framed as disparate and distinct, overlap and converge. The past, sacred stories and practices, genealogy, and personal mythologies are merged in Lopaz’ practice to underscore intersections of time and space.

Artistic research that engages African, Creole, and First Nations epistemologies, cosmologies, and methodologies are essential to his work. Lopaz’ research has been supported through stipends, fellowships, scholarships, and residencies from institutions including: The Berlin Senat for Culture and Europe, the documenta Institut, Stiftung Kunstfonds, Theater Rotterdam, the University of Bayreuth, Flutgraben, Ebenböck Haus, and Zucker Erben. Lopaz has exhibted and performed at events and institutions including the 10th Berlin Biennale, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the Neues Museum, Kunstverein Hamburg, The HAU, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Beursschouwburg, and the 7th Afroeuropean Biennale. His work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Der Speigel, and ZDF. In the spring of 2024, Lopaz founded Black Visual Grammar, a mobile archive which engages Black perspectives on an array of themes and subjects through collage workshops which coincide with public exhibitions.

Dr. Fiorella Montero-Diaz is a Senior Lecturer in ethnomusicology at Keele University. She has a degree in Sound Engineering and Piano Performance from Peru, her country of birth. She later moved to the UK where she was awarded several international student excellence grants and graduated with distinction from Goldsmiths – University of London (MA in Ethnomusicology, 2008) and Royal Holloway – University of London (PhD in Music, 2014). In 2015 she was appointed as Keele’s first Lecturer in Ethnomusicology.

Dr. Montero-Diaz is known nationally and internationally for placing music and the arts at the centre of debates on race and class equality, anti-racist strategies, conflict transformation and the creation of new citizenships within contemporary post-conflict urban societies. Her impactful work has contributed to shaping cultural policies in Peru, and has been lauded by ministers, policymakers, and human rights and peace organisations in Latin America.

Dr Fiorella Montero-Diaz has an extensive record of leadership and cross-institutional engagement. She was Director of Programmes for Music and Music Technology at Keele University (2018-2022), where she had a leading role in the creation of new UG creative programmes and development of new courses. Between 2014-2017 she was the General Administrator and Archivist of the British Forum of Ethnomusicology, during this period she built the BFE’s first historical archive. She sat on the Executive Board of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and the Equalities, Diversity and Inclusion in Music Studies Network. Now, she is the new Chair of the BFE, the first indigenous, queer and non native English speaker who leads this important subject association. In recognition of her contribution to advancing EDI in Higher Education, Dr Montero-Diaz was awarded the 2020 Stonewall Role Model of the Year Regional Award and the 2019 Keele Excellence Award.

Dr Montero-Diaz’ research generates transformative, interdisciplinary approaches to the intersection between music, social inclusion and new citizenships. She was recently awarded as Principal Investigator a GCRF Networking Grant from the Academy of Medical Sciences for “Sounding a Queer Rebellion: LGBTI Musical Resistances in Latin America” (2020), which is building an interdisciplinary network of 13 partners in South American countries.

In this month’s “Spat Back At Ya” positionality conversation, Berlin legend Bleach has SPAT the questions back at host Mad Kate.

Every couple of years, S.W.E.A.T. host Mad Kate likes to do a “positionality check-in” about where they are coming from and where they are at in their on-going research about the body in LABOUR. In this very special episode, in collaboration with BLEACH for her new Berlin based zine SPAT Mag!, Berlin drag artist, DJ and punk icon BLEACH has taken on the job of being the interviewer and Mad Kate is the interviewee.

BLEACH is … Essex raised, Berlin Based Drag performer is a central figure in the German capital’s queer underground, creating parties, shows & festivals. Starting out in a burlesque bar in Stockholm she entertains with a fiery mix of punking, stripping & speeching. A regular host of Berlin club nights, drag shows with a loud point of view. When DJing she plays a wide range of music to keep dancers on their toes, acidy house with sparks of rock n roll punk tunes.

An exerpt of this interview will be printed in SPAT! Mag, a late nite Berlin zine: spatmag.net

Sārāh Mārtinus (she/they) is a research-informed artist and ancestral lineage healer. Her work focuses on relational kinship & contradiction (non dual, ritual) practice, decentralizing, deconditioning, and decolonizing through process-led co-emergence and intrapsychic ecologies. She writes, paints, and creates sound through centralising darkness, transformation, and intersectional shadow integrations, her multi-media practice operating as a form of processual meaning-making – locating wound within cultures of disappearances.

As descendant of both migrating Sri Lankan diaspora and Irish settling colonies, Sarah came into being on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of Woiwurrung language group, in Kulin Nation; the Traditional Custodians of Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Her lineages weave through South Asia & Europe, outwards/inwards, reconciling in rivers of reparation, remembrance

Her work is currently published through ‘unbecomings’, Zilberman Gallery, Berlin (October, 2025), curated by Misal Adnan Yildiz after their constellating of performance dialogues ‘When one of us remembers who we really are, all of us remember’ at Pickle Bar, Berlin (June, 2025).

Sārāh offers one on one sessions and community ceremony, with ritual and witness counsel for power rebalance.

www.sarahmartinus.com

This month’s conversation is with erotic performer and activist Chiqui Love. Chiqui Love is a burlesque and striptease artist and storyteller with over 22 years of experience.

A power femme and co-founding member of two strippers’ collectives—East London Strippers Collective and Berlin Strippers Collective—she works to de-stigmatize sex work and open a dialogue around more ethical ways of providing and consuming erotic entertainment. Her approach centers on empowering workers and welcoming every gender and body shape. She is a passionate advocate for fair working conditions and for putting women at the forefront of any conversation involving bodily autonomy, pleasure, and freedom.

Chiqui Love’s mission is to raise awareness—especially among women—encouraging them to enjoy their bodies unashamedly and embrace their inner bitch-ass goddess.

This months conversation is with Sami Rhymes, an International Award-Winning Spoken Word Artist, Poet and Author from London, UK. She also works in Project Management and as a Freelance Creative.

Sami had her first poem published at the age of 9 in a young writers anthology. She released her debut collection 20 Something in 2020 and has contributed poems to other publications including It Will Be: The Black Experience and the Words By anthology.

From the playground to groundbreaking stages, Sami has performed and headlined at a number of public and private events & festivals in London, nationally and abroad in Malaysia and Greece. She has also won International Slams in New Zealand, Abu Dhabi and locally in the UK.

She has featured on a number of local radio stations including BBC Radio London. Sami has also appeared on ITV News London S1:E3 of the BAFTA winning Sky Arts commissioned TV show Life & Rhymes and Islam Channel to name a few.

2022 saw Sami pick up “Best Female Spoken Word Poet” and also marked the release of her Debut EP Triple Threat . 2023 saw Sami take her rhymes to adverts, new stages and cities. From her first Sofar Sounds to her first Glastonbury Festival Sami continues to grow as a creative. Her next album and book are in progress with the audio “Silent Battles” set to be released first in 2025. Sami is also preparing the script for a one woman show which she will showcase in the near future.

Sami uses rhyme as a means of release and therapy and through her spoken word inspires people in her community to speak up and take action. Her poetry touches on everything from identity to communities and places, relationships, mental health, injustices and day to day experiences. She also facilitates workshops, presents talks, ghostwrites and takes on commissions for bespoke requests.

This month’s conversation with with transdisciplinary artist Liz Rosenfeld. Liz Rosenfeld is an NYC-born, Berlin-based transdisciplinary artist who works with film/video, performance, drawings and experimental writing practice. Liz addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, and past and future histories regarding the ways in which memory is queered. Their work deals with flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focusing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, approaching questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space and how queer ontologies are grounded in variant hypocritical desire(s).

Their work has been shown internationally in film festivals, museums and galleries, and their film White Sands Crystal Foxes was nominated for Best Experimental Short Film at the Berlinale’s 2022 Teddy Awards. Liz was also one of the nominated artists for the ANTI –Contemporary Art Festival’s 2022 Shortlist Live Award, and their short films are represented by Video Data Bank and LUX Moving Image. They are currently on tour with their new book, Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising, out on Rutgers University Press and co-written with Dr. Joao Florencio.

This month’s conversation is with activist, writer, and engineer Ahmad Badawy. I met Ahmad at the protest encampment in front of the German parliament in 2024, where we were both calling attention to Germany’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We first connected when I shared my interest in organizing freelance workers. Ahmad responded with encouragement, sharing insights from his own experience and reminding me that movements often begin with simple, one-to-one conversations.

We recorded this episode on the eve of the Unkürzbar demonstration, during which pro-Palestinian activists were forcibly separated from the rest of the march. It’s a moment that speaks volumes about the urgency of solidarity. During our conversation, Ahmad and I strategize and dream about how to make these important connections across different kinds of difference.

Originally from Egypt, Ahmad was an activist in the 2011 revolution and in grassroots labor organizing. He was imprisoned for four years in a maximum-security prison for carrying a sign at a protest that read, “No to the constitutional amendments.” During his detention, he undertook a hunger strike to protest being held without trial.

Ahmad has published widely on politics and resistance, and is a contributor to We Were There: Liberal Young Voices from the Egyptian Revolution. In this conversation, we discuss his journey from Cairo to Berlin, the political lessons he’s carried across borders, and his vision for building inclusive, intersectional movements rooted in universal human rights.