S.W.E.A.T. features conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual/ized body at work—work as labour of survival and labour of a/Art with host Mad Kate. This episode features excerpts from three different interviews with interdisciplinary artist Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau. They share thoughts on funding, performativity and code switching before, during and after the pandemic.

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Starting a new year and new season of S.W.E.A.T., this episode goes back to the very beginning with the first interview on the topic conducted in 2019 with Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, an interdisciplinary artist living and working between Germany and Colombia. Later, during a collaborative 2020 HYENAZ project called "Perimeter," Simon(e) shares thoughts about their intersectionalities and how this effects how they are read in different contexts. Finally and most recently in 2023, they share thoughts post-pandemic about German arts funding during Covid and how it has affected them and their practice.

Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau is a German-Colombian interdisciplinary artist. Their works are located between cinema, video installations and performance, dealing with queer decoloniality. Simon(e) studied Media Art at the KHM Cologne and Film at the EICTV Cuba. Simon(e)’s short films Aribada and Mila Caos have both premiered at Cannes Directors Fortnight and toured worldwide international film festivals such as New York film festival, BFI London, Rotterdam, Guanajuato film festival etc. Aribada won several international awards and prizes, including the Emerging Talent Prize at kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and a nomination for the Queer Palm in Cannes 2022. Simon(e)'s first feature film the Whisper of the Jaguar premiered at Documenta14 and won the award for Best Director at the International Cartagena Film Festival. Simon(e)’s performance works, and video installations have premiered at Wexner Center of the Arts, Haus der Kulturen der Welt HKW, Kasseler Dokfest Monitoring, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Cinemateca de Bogotá, as well as the 11th Berlin Biennale.

More about Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau: http://www.lapaetau.com/ More about HYENAZ Perimeter audio-visual work: https://www.hyenaz.com/perimeter/

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.

More about Mad Kate and the podcast: 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.