« S.W.E.A.T. » (Sex/uality. Work. Extraction. Art. Theatr/ics): with Sky Deep #45

Sky Deep is a Berlin-based live performer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer whose work fuses raw emotion, social consciousness, and technical mastery. Born in Los Angeles and shaped by the underground scenes of New York and Berlin, she merges electronic music, live instrumentation, and performance art into electrifying, genre-defying shows.

A driving force in queer and POC visibility within electronic music, Sky founded Reclaim the Beats Festival and leads her label Reveller Records as a platform for community-driven experimentation. As MIDI-Music Director and core multi-instrumentalist for Peaches’ OOPS Tour (2020), she helped sculpt the tour’s radical live sound architecture — extending her artistry from club stages to global arenas.

Her sonic imagination also extends into film, television, and theater: she created sound design for Shu Lea Cheang’s feature UKI, served as music supervisor for Loving Her (ZDFneo), and designs sound for productions at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and other major German theaters. Every project carries her signature spirit — joyful, unapologetic, and deeply human.

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.