Salomania

Dancing Quietly

After many dark years of depression Luca seeks to gain her high school diploma. Her little dog Mata helps her to find motivation and keep a positive attitude towards life...

Moving Backwards

Starting with the feeling of being pushed backwards by recent reactionary backlashes, Moving Backwards explores resistance practices, combining post-modern choreography with guerrilla techniques and elements of queer underground culture. Different performers complicate the notion of backwards movement, prompting an uncanny experience that defies temporal and spatial logic.

Toxic

The film Toxic shows two protagonists in an undated time, a punk figure in glitter (Ginger Brooks Takahashi) and a drag queen (Werner Hirsch), both of unclear gender and origin. They linger in an environment of glossy remains, of toxic plants and transformed ethnographic and police photography. While the punk gives a speech on toxicity and a performance referencing early feminist art works, the drag queen reenacts an interview of Jean Genet from the ‘80s and blames the filmmakers for exposing her to the police-like scenario of being filmed. The camera turns and depicts the space-off, the space outside the frame.

Charming for the Revolution

Drag performer Werner Hirsch is seen walking a turtle, channelling the 19th-century dandy, protesting the frenzy of industrialisation. With a nod to underground artist Jack Smith, as well as to queer and feminist campaigns such as Wages for Housework, the film recreates the ‘housewife’ as an ambiguous figure with an open future.

N.O.Body

The film restages a photograph of the ‘bearded lady’ Annie Jones (1865 – 1902). She lived in the USA and was one of the most famous bearded ladies of her time. She toured throughout the USA and all over Europe, first with the Barnum Circus and then later with her own show. The photograph of Annie Jones crosses through two contexts of difference. It travelled from the freak show in the Barnum Circus, where she was presented as a ‘wonder’ or a ‚freak‘ (for a fee), to the medical theater, where she was shown in Hirschfeld’s book as a potential ‘patient.’

To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation

One continuous give-and-take as six performers push towards a paradigm shift in the future. Following a 1970 score written by Pauline Oliveros in response to SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, they ask ‘Can sounds, rhythms and light produce queer relations? Can they become revolutionary?'