WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST

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.

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 response to the suits of the Tarot deck, reimagined here by Josefien Cornette and Bebe Books, artists Malaika Cunningham & Jennie Moran have concocted a collection of moments of hospitality for those attending the launch. They have created a menu of interruptions and edible offerings designed to spark mischief and fuel connections made over chance encounters.

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. 

Listening to your body is something we all think is important. But have you ever listened to your gut? According to Dani Bershan and her crew, there are answers there to questions we're all chewing on. About the eco-bio-psycho-social crisis, for example.

Living in a time where definitions of health and disease are distorted to an extent that leaves most of us feeling confused, overwhelmed, isolated, disconnected and angry, this symposium aims to take a deep dive into our collective predicament through co-sensing with GUT MATTERS, aiming to expand our metabolic literacies. The gut, guardian of our immune system, host of our intuition and site of awe-inspiring complex ecologies blurs the boundaries between what we call our body and what we call the world. In this symposium, Dani Bershan and invited guests Sarah Amsler, Dani d’Emilia, Irena Radmanovic and Red Vaughan Tremmel will bring together findings from their respective and multilayered fields of practice: performance, queer etymology, decolonial studies, eco-poetics, body/land somatic work, microbiology/mycology and history and queer studies to take a closer look at metabolisms together.

Come and spend a full experiential and experimental journey with us including conversations, somatic experiences, lectures, poetry, immersive reflection and body work starting friday night at Kunsthal continuing at Viernulvier Saturday morning and afternoon and ending at Kunsthal on Saturday evening. Please see the full program below and book your tickets here.

Listening to your body is something we all think is important. But have you ever listened to your gut? According to Dani Bershan and his crew, there are answers there to questions we're all chewing on. About the eco-bio-psycho-social crisis, for example.

The exhibition GUT MATTERS (on view at Kunsthal Gent) brings together the core elements of a five-year investigation by artist Dani Bershan. The exhibition includes an installation, a sound work and an immersive performative sculpture. The sculpture is brought to life by three performers (Sara Leghissa, Roni Katz and Nattan Dobkin) and is activated six times during the exhibition. There will also be a publication, a reading group, a symposium and public talks.

Our digestion breaks down mass into energy, maintaining an entire body of tissue. All little ecosystems combined to form a big organism. That whole process of conversion is our metabolism. And that metabolism, according to Bershan, is a great mirror for how we live, let live, love and prefer not to. In other words, to dwell on your gut is to dwell on the fact that you are just one small organism in a big machine. Put another way: to think about your gut is to think about how humble we really should be. Chances are you hadn't looked at it that way yet.