sex/uality. work. extraction. art. theatr/ics.
S.W.E.A.T. features conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual/ized and racialized body at work—work as performed labour of survival, care and a/Art. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.
S.W.E.A.T. airs first on Freie Radios Berlin Brandenburg via colabora dio, the second Tuesday of every month at 13:00 CET, and features music curated by my guests. Afterwards the interview portion is available where-ever you get your podcasts. This podcast is entirely self-produced and is a labour of love. You can support this work and the continuation of this project on my Patreon.
- by Mad KateS.W.E.A.T. features conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual/ized body at work—work as labour of survival and labour of a/Art with host Mad Kate. This month's conversation is with editor and curator María Inés Plaza Lazo. María Inés Plaza Lazo founded in 2018, together with Paul Sochacki, the multilingual streetnewspaper for art and society, wealth and poverty called Arts of the Working Class. Since then, she writes for the paper and allied publications, edits pieces individually and collectively, sells advertisement spots according to each issue's topics and interests, talks constantly with vendors, contributors and potential collaborators, curates exhibitions related […]
- by Mad KateThis month's conversation is with artist and activist Cassie Thornton. Cassie makes a safer space for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). Her 2020 book, The Hologram: […]
- by Mad KateIn this new season of S.W.E.A.T. we will dive more deeply into questions around how we organize, vision and dream new strategies for work care and survival. Starting off is a very fresh conversation with two artists and activists Jara Nassar and Joshua Schwebel, recorded on the 7th of January, just one day before a demonstration in front of Berlin's Abgeordnetenhaus, where inside was being discussed the adoption of the IHRA WDA as a prerequisite for the reception of cultural funding from the Senat. Jara and Joshua work in the collective Arts and Cultural Alliance Berlin, who organized the demonstration […]
- by Mad KateThis month's episode is with DJ and producer TMSKDJ. The masked DJ (TMSKDJ) born Micheel Nana Adwoa Agyakomah Yeboah is an electronic and African Dance Music DJ and producer based in Accra, Ghana. TMSKD pronounced as THE MASKED is one of the few disc jockeys in Ghana breaking the status quo of Djing with her versatile skill set of introducing and fusing alternative sounds to the Accra music scene often electronic and African Dance genres into her live performances. As a young and gifted DJ, mostly conservative reflecting a persona of an introvert, she uniquely came up with the masked […]
- by Mad KateThis months episode features Palestinian documentary photographer and visual storyteller Rasha Al Jundi and Palestinian collective experimental designer, artist, architect, and performer Michael Jabareen. Rasha Al Jundi (1984) is a Palestinian documentary photographer and visual storyteller. She grew up in the UAE, after which she moved to Lebanon to pursue higher education. During her seven year stay in the country, she volunteered with the Lebanese Red Cross and worked with a local NGO coordinating rural development programs. Between 2009 and 2021, she worked with several civil society organisations, in the Near East, and Africa. Her work generally follows a social […]
- by Mad KateThis month's show features artist and researcher Elly Clarke. Mad Kate interviewed Elly Clarke in the context of their project with Adrienne Teicher, HYENAZ. For the past two years HYENAZ have been researching cultures of extractivism within field recording and arts in general. Elly Clarke is an artist and researcher. The focus of her multimedia-based artistic work lies on the transformation of the physical body in an increasingly digitally-mediated and experienced world, which she explores through performance, video, photography, music, curated and community-based projects. And through #Sergina, a multi-bodied drag queen who, across one body and several, performs online and […]
- by Mad KateThis months episode features choreographer, performer and Queer energetic healer Ambrita Sunshine who recently collaborated with Mad Kate in Berlin on "sweating together" at alpha nova & galerie futura Ambrita Sunshine is a POC Queer artist & performer, actively working on both Europe and West Africa scene. Coming through a multidisciplinary path, she trained as a dancer and choreographer creating a fusion between various disciplines that she loves and practiced for a long time, including BDSM, sexual energy awakening practices, tantra, dance, use of sound and voice. She completed a lots of studies in Energy Healing, Esoteric Traditions in West […]
- by Mad KateThis months conversation is with visual artist and sculptor Chang Gao. Chang Gao is a visual artist using multiple media in her practice production, like sculpture, hologram installation and photographic languages. Her work overlapped with the field of psychology, aiming to trigger audience’s desire and bodily responses. By exploring the relations between the very personal matter of the human body and the public space, her artwork serves as an alternative method to address the pressing cultural issue in Chinese public space. She worked as a public art researcher at the Public Art Research Centre of China – China Central Academy […]
- by Mad KateS.W.E.A.T. features conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual/ized body at work—work as labour of survival and labour of a/Art with host Mad Kate. This episode features artist Mürüvvet Türkyılmaz, whose work delves into the themes of borders, mapping, geography, and memory. We met in the context of Tanja Ostojić's Mis(s)placed Women? collaborative art project at DEPO Gallery in Istanbul in 2022. Born in Izmir in 1968, Türkyılmaz currently resides and creates from Istanbul, Turkey. Since 1996, her artistic journey has taken her across numerous exhibitions in Turkey and abroad, where she has been invited to showcase her work. […]
- by Mad KateThis conversation features artist Montserrat Gardó Castillo and is led by Mad Kate and Adrienne Teicher in the context of their work on cultures of extraction. They talk about collaboration, the naked body, and rules of engagement. Montserrat Gardó Castillo is a performance artist. She studied dance at the Institut del Teatre/Barcelona and at the Folkwang UdK/Essen as well as journalism at the URL/Barcelona. She is currently studying for a Master’s degree in Humanities and Contemporary Art at the UOC/Barcelona. After working with VA Wölfl/NEUER TANZ (2009 to 2017), she started creating her own work together with Petr Hastik and […]
- by Mad KateThis month features professor, writer and dancer Thomas F. DeFrantz in conversation with HYENAZ (myself + Adrienne Teicher) in the context of our project on art and cultures of extraction. Together we talk about time, Black aesthetics, NOWness and the processes of building creative encounters. Thomas F. DeFrantz teaches at Northwestern University and directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; the group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. He believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. Thomas' creative projects include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by […]
- by Mad KateThis episode features performance artist, writer and director Lori Baldwin who shares some of her pandemic hustles and her latest work with OONA about the visibility of women*s art and labour. Today's conversation features performance artist, writer and director Lori Baldwin, whose thought-provoking work is based in the desire for connection and disruption. She designs performances and experiences intended to call spectators to action by questioning aspects of their immediate surroundings. Through theatre, live art and film, Lori's approach weaves lightness and provocation together in order to challenge commonly held ideas about power, gender, endings, eroticism, and death. In her […]
- by Mad KateS.W.E.A.T. (Sex/uality. Work. Extraction. Art. Theatr/ics) with Donato Laborante S.W.E.A.T. features conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual/ized body at work—work as labour of survival and labour of a/Art with host Mad Kate. This episode features Italian poet, storyteller and curator Donato Laborante. Today's show features a conversation that my collaborator Adrienne Teicher and I had with artist Donato Laborante in the context of our ongoing project about cultures of extraction and artistic practices. We are also joined by artist Federica Dauri, who is translating for us. Adrienne and I met Donato in 2015 when we first toured to […]
- by Mad KateS.W.E.A.T. features conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual/ized body at work—work as labour of survival and labour of a/Art with host Mad Kate. In this episode, HYENAZ (Adrienne Teicher and Mad Kate) speak to Professor Imre Szeman, in regards to their project Art and Extractivism. They speak about defining extractivism, the role of the artist in using the term, the use and limitation of regarding everything as animate, and greenwashing. Imre Szeman is the inaugural Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. From 2021-2022, he […]
- by Mad KateThis episode features excerpts from three different interviews with interdisciplinary artist Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau. They share thoughts on funding, performativity and code switching before, during and after the pandemic. S.W.E.A.T. Starting a new year and new season of S.W.E.A.T., this episode goes back to the very beginning with the first interview on the topic conducted in 2019 with Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, an interdisciplinary artist living and working between Germany and Colombia. Later, during a collaborative 2020 HYENAZ project called "Perimeter," Simon(e) shares thoughts about their intersectionalities and how this effects how they are read in different contexts. Finally and most […]
- by Mad KateThis final episode of 2022 closes out the first season of S.W.E.A.T. with a personal note. I’ll be speaking about my own positioning as I come into this project—my own relationship to sex, work, extraction, art and theatrics and the personal-political intersections that I bring to the table when I speak to others in conversation. As a special HOLIDAY BONUS, I’ll be airing the soundpiece SWEAT Kumasi that I composed after the first series of interviews that were conducted when I was an artist in resident at perforcraze International Artist Residency (-pIAR) in Kumasi, Ghana in 2021. The soundpiece contains […]
- by Mad KateJustice aka Karyka is a Nigerian IT student living and working in Kumasi Ghana. When we met he was running a barber shop part time and I was looking for a fresh haircut. He is a drummer at his uncle’s church, singer and aspiring actor, which are just a few of his future dreams as he takes on many part time jobs. We spoke about how he hustles to get by as a Nigerian migrant to Ghana and what he dreams of in the future. Justice became a fast friend and an integral part of the performance we made together […]
- by Mad KateEryka Dellenbach (b. Chicago) is an experimental filmmaker, dancer and interdisciplinary performance artist based in Tucson, Arizona. They approach film as a devotional practice, and use body-based performance and dance collaboration as a method of research, connection and mutual evolution. Their works mine relationships to power and erotics, and explore fluid consent as a generative source of form and narrative. They earned their bachelor degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago and their masters in Film, Video, New Media, Animation and Sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their movement practice has been heavily […]
- by Mad KateToday’s episode features Muhammedu Abubakari, a teacher of Arabic and Quran, a translator, and a skilled tailor. He translates and speaks in conversation with me and Jawo Zaria Graba, a cocoa farmer and Isshak Fuseini, an economics student. Together we toured the forest where they produce crops and shared with me their extensive knowledge of the plants and crops that were growing there – palm and the process of extraction palm oil and wine, coconut, cocoa plant, avocado, yam, as well as the medicinal qualities of the plants all coexisting there. While we were walking we also talked politics of […]
- by Mad KateThis episode features a conversation with artist Amina Gimba in 2021 at PerfocraZe International Artist Residency -p IAR in Kumasi, Ghana. Amina is a visual artist and freelance graphic designer from Northeast Nigeria who specialises in simplifying everyday experiences into provocative artistic pieces, using ink, colour pencils, crayons, tie and dye, and graphic design software. We spoke about the power of illustration to speak across language, the possibilities for silence in our everyday communication, the joy of making queer art, and the dream of working for free. S.W.E.A.T. features conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual/ized body at work—work […]