« S.W.E.A.T. » (Sex/uality. Work. Extraction. Art. Theatr/ics): with Mykki Blanco #52

My conversation this month is with American rapper, performance artist, writer, and poet Mykki Blanco. Blanco just announced his newest album since 2022's Stay Close to Music — it's called CAFE PARADISO, out September 4th via Transgressive Records, which includes three videos shot in and around Berlin. I had the pleasure of speaking with him from his home in Tangier, Morocco, where he recently moved after years living between Lisbon, Paris, and Switzerland.

Blanco has been an outspoken voice in music since the early 2010s, when he first emerged from New York's underground scene — fighting, in his own words, to be seen as an artist first in an industry that wasn't always ready for him. He's been publicly living with HIV for a decade, using songs like "Carry On" to push back on stigma, and before he ever picked up a mic he was a poet, publishing his first book, From the Silence of Duchamp to the Noise of Boys. He reflected with me on performance as connection — what it means to hold a stage alone for an hour with nothing but his own instincts — and we closed out talking about the global economy, the gap between billionaires and everyone else, and what care looks like right now inside artist communities that are struggling to get by.

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.

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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.