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ECHOES OF ECSTASY: UNBOUND TONGUES by Markus Gebhardt and Beta M. Alexander is an aspic buffet that trips off the tongue and transcends taste norms. Indulge in a tantalising celebration of pleasure, queerness, and the liberating power of colourful choices. Not only will the long-remaining flavours provoke some collective tongue-in-cheek activism.
During the three festival days, Claire Lefèvre invites you to a radically soft space: a room to rest, take breaks between shows and flip through all her favourite books. Arrive early, grab a blanket, relax your jaw and let your shoulders drop. Works by textile artist Sophie Utikal hover in the room: they can be sensed, caressed, or used to hide behind. A gentle soundscape composed by Zosia Hołubowska cocoons your ears. Cuddle puddles encouraged but not mandatory. Sit down. Slow down. Melt down. This work is a pocket-sized version of Claire’s stage work FULL MELT DOWN, which explores radical softness as a choreographic practice and a form of resistance. Here, sensorial experiences and intuition are cherished, and there is no such thing as being too dramatic, too emotional, or too soft.
is a femme 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. Between 2019 and 2022, she researched the concept of radical softness as a choreographic strategy, embracing hypersensitivity as a method, a topic, and a portal through which to imagine (the) work. Currently, she is exploring the archetype and working methods of a performance doula, a role imagined to disinvisibilise care work in the context of performance making.
(born in 1987 in the United States) is a textile artist who lives and works between Berlin and Vienna. She studied contextual painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and is a co-editor of the book Anti-Colonial Fantasies/Decolonial Strategies (2017). Her artworks have been shown throughout Europe, including Kristinstads Konsthal (2022), Kunsthalle Vienna (2021), Mediterranea Biennale 19 in San Marino (2021), and Museion Bolzano (2018). Sophie Utikal sews large-format fabric banners with figurative and, thus, immediately legible scenes that stand for abstract key terms and fears of our time. The black yarn, sewn with a quick hand, gives the scenarios something urgent and stands in contrast to the colours, which initially appear soft to cheerful.
(born in 1988 in Poland) is a queer sound artist, musician, and music curator, working and living in Vienna since 2016. They explore archives of folk Eastern European music, as well as traditions of magic, herbalism, and demonology, and experiment with archaic ways of singing to create queer soundscapes, installations, performative rituals and audio essays. They also create sound designs for performances.