Nov 24+25. ASPHALT Series

ASPHALT Series
a performance program curated by Dinis Machado

With: CNIDARIEL, Luan Okun, Mia Meneses, Camila Malenchini, Progressive Genitalia, Gareth Cutter and Gemma Nash, Slim Soledad, XD Eric.

Mermaid of the Asphalt,
Queen of the Moonlight,
Only hand your body
to those who can carry it.
From ”Serei A” by Linn da Quebrada

Displacing from binary understandings and formulations, ASPHALT series articulates a program by artists inhabiting spaces in between identities but also in between theatricalities, genres, techniques, narratives and dispositifs. A group of artists with entagled identitites and practices where clouds of fragmentary materialities, densities and desires weave dissident politics, sensations and fictions melted into performative unknowns.

ASPHALT is a context that articulates genders as variable understandings and formulations crossed by migratory fluxes, class experiences, cultural backgrounds, racializing gazes and experiences and projected disability. Gathering a group of artists that articulate themselves and their queer practices in diverse ways that reflect their life journeys and production contexts, the program looks to de-objectualize the queer body fragmenting it into a multitude of possibilities and propositions.



November 24

7pm- CNIDARIEL – CNIDARIEL (Music / Performance)
8pm – Luan Okun – C0rp0Lento (Performance)

November 25
4pm – Mia Meneses – Bloco 101 (Theatre)
5.15pm – Camila Malenchini – On Faun (Dance)
6.15pm – Progressive Genitalia – Reimagining Intimacy (Performance)

8pm – Gareth Cutter and Gemma Nash – The Quips (Music / Video / Radio / Activism)
9pm – Slim Soledad (DJ set)
10.30pm – XD Eric (DJ set)

Weld
Norrtullsgatan 7

Book: book.weld.se


CNIDARIEL

Music: cnidariel.bandcamp.com
Website: cnidariel.com
Instagram: @cnidariel

CNIDARIEL exists in a distorted sonic and visual world that explores excess, alienation, vulnerability and the body. CNIDARIEL is a Stockholm based audiovisual performance/music project that combines lyricism in Swedish with grim soundscapes and influences from pop, folklore, club culture and ritualistic/orchestral dramaturgy.

In September 2022, their second EP Fantasy Bonding was released, following the debut album Köttets Väg in 2020. CNIDARIEL is what is played on the inside of your head in the moonlight during your best fever ridden night. This performance has previously been shown at the Norberg Festival in Sweden in the summer of 2023.

Foto: Lamia Karin


Luan Okun
C0rp0Lento

Corpolento Adj.
1. Excessively fat, obese, or adipose.
2. Possessing advantage dimensions, voluminous.

Lento Adj.
1. Revealing a lack of speed or agility, slow, sluggish.
2. Not in a hurry.
2. Prolonging time.

To conjure, not just with the definitions, but with the various possibilities we can create to narrate our own journey. Slowness, deceleration, the rest of the bodies that are always running through colonial demands become a deadly weapon against the colonisation that still attempts to imprison our subjectivities. In this process, we will work with slow movements to stimulate the viewer’s meticulous gaze. Bringing the element of earth as a metaphor for understanding the need to silence in order to hear the movements, dances, roots, and lives that flow beneath the earth.

Performance by Luan Okun and Hêlo Santiago
Research: Luan Okun
Dramaturgy Reference: Mateus Aleluia

Photo: Fayska


Mia Meneses
Bloco 11

The body does not reflect the person who inhabits it.

Stripped of the layers that make us people, all we have left is dance. Dance frees us from our condition. Movement is freedom.

This work is about the body. About what it is to be a marginalized body. A manifesto that refuses the hierarchization of disability and the vision of the dancing body.

Freedom is an urgency. Trying to free the body through dance. To use the frustration of trapped movement to make it fluid.

The fragility of a body can at the same time be the most powerful and strongest thing about it. The condemnation of the body is always made by the gaze of the others. The lust for freedom is greater than the fear of death.

Dramaturgy: Mia Meneses
Direction: Mia Meneses and Susana M. G. Silvério
Performance: Mia Meneses and Mariana Freire
Sound design: Afonso Albuquerque

Photo: Tânia Araújo


Camila Malechini
On Faun

Mythical creatures embody a variety of fears: the potential of chaos to overcome order, of irrationality to prevail over reason, the potential victory of the earthen wild over the encroaching civilizations of mankind. They arise from the desire to domesticate and disempower what a dominant culture finds threatening. Also known as Pan, the faun was the Greek god of the wild, masculine fertility, and sexuality. Simultaneously sinister and prophetic, he frolicked with nymphs and protected the forest.

In On Faun the effigy is used to explore how power has been built and held through mythologies, and how it might transform. As a famous example of the canonization of a mythical creature into western ideology, the work begins with a reconstruction of the ballet L’Après Midi d’un Faune by Nijinsky – an entry point to the re-appropriation and transformation of this sneaky goat-god. From there, the work deals with the movement of molding and becoming, a study in transformation and, when taken, the agency therein, a mash-up between magic, mythology, and how power moves through the beat of a beast.

Choreography and performance: Camila Malechini
Sound design: Fjola Gautadóttir
Dramaturgy: Louise Trueheart
Artistic support: Layton Lachman, Sarah Parolin, Auro Orso.

This work was made during the frame of the 25th JAHRE – TANZNACHT BERLIN.


Progressive Genitalia
Reimagining intimacy

A Progressive Genitalia performance imagining the future of intimacy. Two modified bodies interacting in ways that challenges how we envision sex. Through the 4 stages of intimacy, these two transhumans come together to completely queer how bodies interact and give pleasure through both physical and emotional closeness. In this futuristic performance Mille Bostedt & Elysia Goodridge-Dyson perform in silicone exoskeletons and use movement to explore a brave new way to connect.

Reimagining intimacy
a performance by Progressive Genitalia
with Mille Bostedt & Elysia Goodridge-Dyson
Created in collaboration with Lesbisk Makt


Gemma Nash and Gareth Cutter
The Quips

The Quips is a research and performance project on radio broadcasting’s relationship with disability and pirate radio’s history of rebellion and activism, culminating in a live radio broadcast and video documentation, made by CUTTER // NASH.

When Covid-19 arrived, our interactions – with culture and each other – were remote and online. Now, as society begins to ‘reopen’, disabled and clinically extremely vulnerable people are at risk of being excluded again.

In this landscape of diminishing support and connection, The Quips claims creative space for disabled voices – their humour, rebellion, sexuality – and amplifies them. We take inspiration from radio stations such as the 1947 French radio show ‘La Tribune de l’Invalide’, where disability activists spoke out about the neglect of disabled civilians, and ‘Gaywaves’, the first British radio programme run by and for gay men in the 1980s, the era of Section 28.


Slim Soledad

Slim Soledad multi-artist, born in Guarulhos – São Paulo/BR, co-founder the queer collective Chernobyl, currently resides in Paris. Her body moves through the different sounds inter-passing rhythms like Baile Funk, Vogue and contemporary dances. These connections develop nuances in her body’s creative process as a performer and in her musical production.

I think that since I was very young I have a relationship with art, I mean with music and dance mainly. I believe they were things that marked my childhood and who I am today, I remember my parents always listened to music and we always went once a month to my uncles house where they had parties and sometimes there was a ”dance championship” between the adults and everyone had a lot of fun.


XD Eric

Eric Oliveira aka xD_Eric, she/they/them, São Paulo born and Berlin based multiartist, co-founder of the Brazilian collective ‘Chernobyl’. The passion for music started with the influence of her family. She searching for Latin peripheral music ranging from Brazilian funk, passing through many other aspects as Techno, Hard dance and Latin Core that make LATAM catch fire. Their approach to Black music comes from some of her family members, like her father and uncles, who in the 80’s organized Black Music balls in São Paulo.

I collect countless works that make me proud and I am increasingly hungry for knowledge. I had uncles who are DJs and always thought it was amazing and inspired me.


Weld is supported by Stockholms stad, the Swedish Arts Council and Region Stockholm