White on White:
#6 - Queer Sells

In #6 – Queer Sells White on White researches on the latest, most sophisticated strategies through which white subjects maintain their power position and succeed in dissimulating their identity as winners of the globalized world.

In the upcoming piece the male duo therefore reveals the secret recipe of their future success on the art-market: presenting a sophisticated montage of signifiers of the mainstream with signifiers of a possible minority-status. In the case of White on White: the strategic combination of Whiteness and Queerness. The attempted pinkwashing of our company follows the example of power´s contemporary grammatics: “Yes, I am the president of the united states and male – but i´m also black” or “yes, i am the chancelor of one of the most powerful countries in europe and white – but i´m also a woman.” are the speech acts wedded to the future consistency of power. But how do statements in the social sphere work that do not relate to the appearance of the utterer ? Why can the sexist Göran Persson claim himself to be a feminist and what privileges can be gained from such a move?

As Judith Butler put it “a certain comedy emerges when “queer” becomes so utterly disjoined from sexual practice that every well-meaning heterosexual takes on the term.” In #6 White on White is embracing the comical genre, by presenting a queer performance duo consisting of two straight white males. Whilst White on White #5 – All those beautiful boyz took the discourse of visibility to a level where the eye could figure as the unfailing sense to create order, #6 works on the contradictory assumption, claiming language to be the ultimate signifier of reality: what i say, is who i am.
Working in the theatre space, being a sphere that traditionally produces temporary realities – exactly through speech -, White on White take their specific medial turn on the question: Is there any way to make a performative utterance on stage that transgresses the temporality of the theatre space?

White on White is an internationally working performance group with special focus in Scandinavia and the german-speaking countries. Consisting of Iggy Malmborg (Malmö) and Johannes Schmit (Berlin) the duo has been successfully touring Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Estonia, Germany and Sweden since 2009.

BY Iggy Malmborg, Johannes Schmit LIGHT DESIGN Daniel Goody

Produced by White on White in coproduction with Inkonst, Malmö. Special thanks to Kanuti Gildi SAAL, Tallinn. Special thanks to our media partners Jungle World and taz.die tageszeitung.