Aktion 398 and Milk & Blood

Video documentation of an online book launch of  A Good Love Story by Sibylle Peters on 14th February 2021. This conversation spanned  love, intimacy and isolation, the state of Pleasure Activism today,  heterasexuality and the question of what constitutes a good love story.

Sibylle Peters was joined by artist, activist and editor of German pop feminist Missy Magazine Margarita Tsomou; writer and sexual health activist Almaz Ohene; artist and activist Brian Lobel; artist and Heteraclub collaborator Ansuman Biswas; Canadian based artist and activist Cassie Thornton; and artist and A Good Love Story editor Hester Chillingworth.

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.

This fully-illustrated book brings together for the first time an account of Baker’s career as an artist – from her first sculptures at Central St Martins in the early 1970s to her most recent work, ‘How to Live’ and ‘Diary Drawings’ – with critical commentary by reviewers and academic practitioners.

This article presents the research and performance practice behind ‘The Performing Solidarity Project’.

An edited volume that explores the work of the innovative, experimental and internationally acclaimed performance artist Marilyn Arsem, with 200 images.

This story is a product of lockdown, of not being able to create gatherings and experiences with, and for, other people. It is an account of intensely personal histories and experiences, that usually stay behind the screens. It is also a document of the Heteraclub project and the safe space created there, in which hundreds of women shared their stories of love and pleasure.

Documentation of the event which featured a screening of Theatre Visionary, a documentary about Abdoh, as well as a discussion with film’s director Adam Soch and director and academic Alyson Campbell.

Documentation of the evening which featured a screening of short films and performance documentation by artists working around ritual, performance and queer futurity.

Catalogue of the 7th Art of Encounter, focuses on anagrammatic encounters. 4/10-26/10 2018.

In german and English.

Explores fat activist language.

Nine minute video of the performance.

Looks at two pieces which  use the ‘scene’ of wreckage to pursue coherence.