SPIT SPELLS SPIKES
“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”[1]
It’s in the glow of workshop participants floating into the foyer, their skins full of oil and faces full of bliss.
It’s in the time we take to wait until someone appears, because they needed a moment before the artist talk starts. Holding this awkward-precious-ardent space together, patiently.
It’s “working with horniness not as a feeling but as a material”[2]
It’s in the gentle guidance of the evening´s hostess, invoking “Black Transcestors”[3] and reminding us that we owe this moment to them.
It’s in giving the option to step out, to stay quiet, to take a pathway without stairs. In offering free Sekt and alcohol-free beer.
It’s writing this text in bed while my love dictates Muñoz´s quotes to me as I type, the traces of our kisses still hovering over my skin.
“We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness´s domain.“
Beyond, the present and into the metaverse.
Distorted voices and enchanting beats welcome us into Tellurian insider, a trippy technicolour tale of queer resistance. The audio-visual magnetospheric ritual-sound-performance, crafted by self-professed digital witches Jagoda Wójtowicz (Flore) & Marta Nawrot (Xenon), also known as art-duo Eternal Engine, merges heart-shattering bass with subliminally sleek graphics. Insider 1 and 2 invite care at the hard core of a symmetrical apocalypse, opening portals into sub-(woofer)-space. Acid pulse and slurpy volcanoes spill spells into the smoke-filled studio. In this radioactivist sci-fi spectacle “STAND WITH UKRAINE” radiates on the wall, propelling riots from the rave cave to the white cube. Motherboard meets mother earth, wildly braided entanglements weave together neon beasts and tie-dye robots. Screeching at a void where the sun used to burn, the multi-sensorial piece also features carefully caressed keyboards, and the most tender quirks. Queer futures aren´t just bright, they are stroboscopic.
“Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”
And so, we thrive to invent new worlds. To melt boundaries and liquefy norms.
Mouth as wetland by Christa.l Wall aka LA_X_FonTAEnI is an ode to such fluidity. A gurgling mermaid hums polyphonic chants as they slide through a viscous landscape. Bathing in a phosphorescent green glow, they glide in and out of a gelatinous membrane covering the stage. They brew smoky potions or cascade down wicked slides. Perpetually metamorphosing, they fluctuate between liquid and solid, forever gel-like. A fountain overflows. Plastic pools birth slimy dances. Throaty loops ooze into gooey melodies. Make a wish against dryness drips into charmed ears, one syrupy splash at the time.
“Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness.”
The utopia becomes palpable, when a whole crowd cheers at the sight of Eve Stainton holding a drill.
In Dykegeist, ornamental and quotidian queer aesthetics merge into a sensory celebration: duct-taped mikes amplify the swag of daddy sneakers, a silver chain sways to the rhythm of hard beats and soft breaths, fingers tantalizingly dip into hair gel to form lubricated spikes. Zippers, buckles, and dangling scorpio straps extend the performer´s body into an exoskeleton: armoured and harnessed they become a Superdyke. The con-sensual dramaturgy invites the audience to participate in this saga: Lifting their raver sunglasses for a moment of negotiation, Eve whispers clear instructions to involved spectators. Some are asked to excavate objects from piles of gravel, others to crawl across the stage. Asking for permission allows generous-steamy-safe encounters to happen, teasing the viewers with unexpected embraces, delightful inadequacy, and the thrilling potential of desired closeness.
Queerness resides in these fragile moments of collective wetness.
It’s hiding in fluorescent lettering infiltrating big institutions.
It’s within the glitches, not yet here, but always there.
[1] All quotes in bold are from Cruising Utopia, The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz, quoted by Hyo Lee during the artist talk.
[2] Veza Fernández in a cigarette break, after a day in the Sweat Spills Spit workshop.
[3] Jolanda Helena Resch quoting joela rivera in her welcome speech.
Claire Lefèvre is a feminist choreographer, insomniac writer, and reality TV enthusiast currently based in Vienna, Austria. She likes to think of herself as a hostess, welcoming collaborators and audience members into kitsch landscapes where politics and poetics are gently interwoven. For the past 3 years she has been researching the concept of radical softness as choreographic strategy, embracing hypersensitivity as a method, a topic, and a portal through which to imagine (the) work. www.clairelefevre.com @clairelefevre.heartemoji