Pleasure and Pain in Community: Performing Queer Archives in Berlin

Pleasure and Pain in Community: Performing Queer Archives in Berlin (2023-ongoing) is a research and arts project that explores the history of Berlin’s queer BDSM scene as a space where trauma can be processed collectively. In deinen Händen werden die Toys zu lebendigen Teilen von mir weaves together first-person interviews with members of Berlin’s queer BDSM community, original choreography inspired by research conducted in the Schwules Museum Archives, and the reading of a letter I discovered within those archives. Written in May 1991 by an anonymous author to his leatherman, the letter expresses pride in how his toys, when in the hands of his lover, become “living parts” of him.

In Prosthesis and Prosthesis II, I draw connections between this letter and the concept of dildotectonics, as articulated by Paul B. Preciado in The Countersexual Manifesto. Preciado describes dildotectonics as technologies of gender and sex that challenge normative constructions of the body and its pleasures. Through this lens, objects such as whips, shackles, or chains are understood as transgressive extensions of the body, opening possibilities for new forms of pleasure and intimacy.

In deinen Handen werden die Toys zu lebendigen Teilen von mir

2024

Video, 00:04:28

Prosthesis

2024

Silicone and nails

120w x 90h cm

Prosthesis II (for Paul B. Preciado)

2024

Polymer plaster

42l x 15h x 10w cm