CRITICAL FRIDAYS

The popularity of bondage with ropes is on the rise in Europe. For many people, bondage seems to be a pleasurable exploration of their own and other people's bodies. Bondage allows access to creative work, expression, play and intense human encounters. Bondage also inspires many people to explore artistic practices such as performance or photography for the first time. As a dancer and choreographer, Felix Ruckert from Berlin represents the artistically committed side of European bondage...

In his film "My Film with Andrei, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Document a Sex Party", photographer, podcaster, author and filmmaker Ayoto Ataraxia portrays a group of young people from a hedonistic, sex-positive movement in Berlin who organize an orgy to celebrate the birthday of their friend Andrei. We don't get to see the orgy in this movie. In conversation with director Ataraxia, we want to talk about new constraints of sexual liberation, about his coexistence with the protagonists, the trust he has gained, the distanced view of his film, as well as about the representability of an orgy and its relevance.

Shantala Hummler and Thomas Traupmann have pornographic literature read (aloud) and invite us to examine its poetic processes more closely: How metaphorical may or how explicit must literary pornography be? What means does it use to affect us readers? How drastic or obscene are these texts? To what extent do they programmatically test the limits of what is acceptable? The history of modern pornography should also be made visible as a genuinely literary history. Together we want to reflect on the topicality and traditional lines of contemporary productions of the pornographic. In this way, we would like to explore writing styles, narrative forms and figurations, but also the political quality of pornography in literature.

What do the art films at the Porny Days Film Festival trigger? How much sex can art tolerate? And how do we talk about images that break with viewing habits and conventions of sexuality? On Sunday afternoon after the legendary Porny Days Film Festival party, we will take time to reflect on the festival experience. We invite people with a background in aesthetics, cultural studies and cultural production to visit the Porny Days Film Festival and share their festival experiences with us.

Dana Reina Téllez is interested in the body as a territory - as a place where (de)colonization processes take place. As a brown PoC migrant, artist and bodyworker in Europe, she creates spaces in which the following questions are to be made visible: Which colonialist-racist and culturally appropriated continuities continue to be practiced and perpetuated in the fields of bodywork and wellness? To what extent are these continuities exerted on our bodies and what might liberation through our own physicality look like?

Michaël Reinhold invites his artistic figures, developed over the course of many years, to a conversation. With a precise eye, he captures social patterns of speech and action that cover up taboos and uncomfortable feelings. Sometimes he imitates them, sometimes he exaggerates them to the point of being unbearable. His personas are loud, playful, unpredictable, sometimes more animal, sometimes more child. As an audience, we are free to listen to their conversations, think along with them or get involved.

Beata Absalon introduces this practice of open-source problem solving invented by the artist Valentina Desideri. The roles of therapist and patient are interchangeable. No solution, no cure is intended. The sessions are for those who do not need or want to be fixed. By playing with the therapeutic set-up, we will rethink the concept of (self-)care. Instead of rashly problematizing problems, we will first look at them curiously, non-judgmentally and benevolently as a potential to unfold unimagined thoughts and images through touch and conversation.