Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer
For the first time in Germany, the Sophiensæle will bring together international works by queer disabled artists as part of the performance festival Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer – with all the challenges and potentials that the intersections of disability and queerness entail. The very title of the festival is a homage to the text of the same name by Carrie Sandahl, with which she wrote queer disabled cultural history in 2003.
The festival takes place in cooperation with the Schwule Museum, which presents the exhibition of the same name from September 1 to January 30, 2023, and questions the fantasy of the ideal body with artworks by 24 international contemporary artists. But it is not only the title and theme that connect the Sophiensæle and the Schwule Museum in September: works by Quiplash, Anajara Amarante, Pelenakeke Brown and Sindri Runudde are represented in both the festival and the exhibition.
The performance festival Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer is an invitation to art practice and discourse around disabled queer life and work. The invited artists not only challenge heteronormativity and gender performances, but also queer cultural practices such as drag and crip them. QUIPLASH, for example, bring a dazzling drag show to the stage with their cast of blind performers, while SINDRI RUNUDDE invites us on a sensorial journey into the intimacy of voice messages. Two productions will premiere at the festival: The work of Pelenakeke Brown explores indigenous concepts of time and space from a crip-queer perspective, and ANAJARA AMARANTE takes us on a queer version of South American surrealism. The program will be completed with a workshop on queer audio description and a panel (information coming soon).
Once swear words, now carefully chosen, the terms queer and crip are emancipatory self-descriptions of many artists to describe their life and art practices. Both terms refer to the ongoing history of social exclusion – not only, but especially in Germany, a country where disabled and queer life was persecuted during National Socialism. Similar to queering, cripping describes subversive practices: These aim to make social as well as cultural norms (especially being non-disabled as a presumed normal state) visible and to expose exclusionary mechanisms.
Curated from a disabled queer perspective by Noa Winter, Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer gives a shared space to these practices, aesthetics, and histories of joy and suffering, of passion and sexuality, of exclusion and community in the present.
WITH Anajara Amarante, Pelenakeke Brown, Sindri Runudde, Quiplash a.o. CURATION Noa Winter
The festival is a production of SOPHIENSÆLE. Supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe - open funding. In cooperation with the Schwulen Museum Berlin. Media partner: taz, die tageszeitung
