« S.W.E.A.T. » (Sex/uality. Work. Extraction. Art. Theatr/ics): with Mad Kate on Positionality #8

This episode closes out the first season and year of S.W.E.A.T. with a personal note. Mad Kate speaks about their own positioning as they come into this project—their own relationship to sex, work, extraction, art and theatrics and my personal-political intersections as they speak to others in conversation. They’ll also speak about the project of S.W.E.A.T. as a whole—its beginnings in Kumasi and its future. Finally they’ll be airing the sound piece SWEAT Kumasi that they composed after the first series of interviews that were conducted in when they were an artist in resident at perforcraze International Artist Residency (-pIAR) in Kumasi, Ghana in 2021. The sound piece contains excerpts from all of the interviews that have been aired over the past year as well as some portions of other interviewees that didn’t get featured in the show.

We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we fuck, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.

You can find out more https://www.alfabus.us/s-w-e-a-t/

Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, sound designer, performance artist and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004, expanding their unique identity-queering, genderfcking and sexpositive performative work throughout music, theatre and film. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world.