Golden Gate questions our normative perceptions of loss and mourning. What is queer grief and in what way can it become a collective movement of melancholy and resistance? Drawing from vanitas, baroque aesthetics around transience and death, the work attempts to make space for gestures, voices and the erotics of mourning needed in today´s pandemic reality. For a long time now, collective mourning and its rituals have been disappearing from public space, making loss a private experience of each individual. In addition, as history, eg. the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, has shown us, some deaths are more worthy of grief than others. Given the lack of representation of death in epidemics, pandemics and suicide, Golden Gate attempts to create space for assisting loss in a queer utopia. If in earlier genres, such as Ars Moriendi, the function of art was to educate about death, what rituals can we imagine today to collectively process the experience of grief? The performers Ania Nowak and Frédéric Gies create a queer representation of companionship through losing and letting go. They rehearse each other’s deaths and use this morbid play not only to confront systems of injury aimed at queer and other minorities in the past and today, but mainly to develop new tactics of care and repair.

The piece lasts about 60 minutes. It doesn’t use any language.The lighting will be rather dark and uses slow moving, abstract projections. A haze machine will be used. The audience area on the grandstand is seated. There are two wheelchair spaces and three beanbag seat that can be reserved by phone or booked via the online ticket shop or at the box office, if available. Admission begins 20-30 minutes prior to show time. We recommend arriving early to select a suitable seat. Please note that the accessibility information is subject to possible changes. It will be updated continuously. If you have any questions or need further information, please contact Gina Jeske at jeske@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 35.

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