WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST

Enjoy coffee and breakfast while absorbing creative insights through film, poetry, and discussions. This edition features Irish journalist Una Mullally. Moderator Róise Goan leads the talk.

OUT is an interdisciplinary performance created by performance maker Ray Young with dance artist Dwayne Antony, now performed by Azara Meghie and Bambi Jordan Philips.

Inspired by personal experiences and ongoing global struggles for LGBTQIA+ rights, OUT combines live art practice with elements of Dancehall and Voguing, presenting a defiant challenge to homophobia and transphobia. Bravely embracing personal, political, and cultural dissonance, OUT carves out a new space to reimagine, reclaim, and celebrate aspects of Caribbean culture from a queer perspective.

Queer projects are a work of joy yet strenuous to sustain in time. Last September at VIERNULVIER, “Aids, archives, and arts assemblies in Belgium” were dissolving when asking: What do we do when our projects end? Half a year later, Castillo, Fefa Vila, Javier Sáez, Marnie Slater, and Roberto Tovar put on a rehearsed reading of Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits), a 1983 film directed by Manchego filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. In the reading, actors play by reading rather than having learnt the words, and use minimal staging. The film narrates the disbanding of a convent of five nuns in Madrid, practicing community health when hosting a singer after she witnesses an overdose death, and meeting each other in each one’s own terms, in a labyrinth of lesbian desires. The five actors host assemblies in the crossroads of arts making and queer community health organizing. For some, this includes “Aids, archives, and arts assemblies in Belgium.”

The Disability/Sick Tarot questions our personal relationship with health, sickness and disability through the format of a tarot deck. How do we love ourselves and take care of ourselves through spirituality? What does healing mean outside the rooms of a hospital? What collective memories do we cherish as unruly and/or sick bodies? Who’s our Emperor? What crip-knowledge lies underneath the Sun?

In the summer of 2024, writer Louise Souvagie undertook a Six Week Crossfit Challenge. It served as a prompt to reflect on concepts like self-determination, heteronormativity in fitness culture, and the inherent rebellion of the fat body. For isn't being fat and staying fat an act of resistance in a world that tells us we have control over our weight?

Fitness is steeped in the idea that we are in a constant battle with our own bodies. When you succeed, you prove your success with a before-and-after photo. But what if you live in a body that rejects a timeline from point A to point B? Then you quickly fall into a category of people who, for various reasons, fight for inclusion, such as the queer community. Unexpectedly, down-ups and deadlifts lead to an affinity between queerness and the fat body.

After the lecture, Louise Souvagie will engage in a conversation with activist Philsan Osman. This event is part of the Women And Children First festival and is a collaboration between Studium Generale and VIERNULVIER.

In the West, we commonly believe that the aversion to fatness is rooted in medical concerns, especially given the purported “obesity epidemic.” However, studies have shown that the aversion to fat bodies in the West precedes medical warnings about any presumed relationship between size and health. Further, research has long established that group most likely to be denigrated for being fat is Black women. In this presentation, Sabrina Strings will show that contrary to popular beliefs, fatphobia is not rooted in health concerns. Rather, it arose as a mechanism to justify the booming enterprise of slavery through the degradation of Black people, and Black women in particular, as unrestrained in their “animal appetites.” Moreover, when the medical establishment elected to take up questions regarding the relationship between fat and health in the 20th century, physicians chose BMI as its proxy, a tool mired in colorblind racism.

Italian choreographer Chiara Bersani and her performers invite you into the undergrowth of an imaginary forest. Are they lost or has someone left them behind? Or did the forest grow up around them one day? In this mysterious habitat they move in tandem with the light and the sound: unpredictable, trembling and fluid. How does a body that cannot walk dance?

For her new creation Sottobosco, Bersani organises workshops for people with a physical disability. At each playground, she and a group of local performers investigate how their bodies can coexist in and with nature. A new step in Bersani’s artistic exploration of the politics of the body.

Words service is staffed by artist Sarah Vanhee, together with other words providers. With this work, Vanhee elaborates on her practice of active and deep listening, central to her oeuvre. words service offers attention and humanity in a hectic society, and is an ethical, aesthetic and symbolic alternative to the far-reaching digitalisation and robotisation of our language, communication and services. 

Naar je lichaam luisteren, dat vinden we allemaal belangrijk. Maar heb je al eens naar je darmen geluisterd? Volgens Dani Bershan en diens crew zitten daar antwoorden over vragen waar we allemaal op zitten te kauwen. Over de eco-bio-psycho-sociale crisis, bijvoorbeeld.

De tentoonstelling GUT MATTERS (te zien in Kunsthal Gent) brengt de kernelementen van een vijf jaar durend onderzoek van kunstenaar Dani Bershan samen. De tentoonstelling omvat een installatie, een geluidswerk en een immersieve performatieve sculptuur. De sculptuur wordt tot leven gebracht door drie performers (Sara Leghissa, Roni Katz en Nattan Dobkin) en wordt tijdens de tentoonstelling zes keer geactiveerd. Daarnaast is er ook een publicatie, een reading group, een symposium en publieke gesprekken.

Grote woorden met veel liggende streepjes, en toch zit er een heel eenvoudige logica in dit denken. Onze spijsvertering breekt massa af tot energie en houdt zo een heel weefsel in stand. Allemaal kleine ecosysteempjes die samen dan weer een groot geheel vormen. Dat hele proces van omzetten is ons metabolisme. En dat metabolisme is volgens Bershan een grote spiegel voor hoe we leven, laten leven, liefhebben en liever niet hebben. Anders gezegd: stilstaan bij je darmen is stilstaan bij het feit dat jij maar één klein organiseme bent in een grote machine. Nog anders gezegd: denken aan je darmen, is denken aan hoe bescheiden we eigenlijk zouden moeten zijn. Grote kans dat je het zo nog niet had bekeken.