A Tuned Body is both performance and methodology – the performed work is, in fact, a vessel for the methodology. In August 2024, we joined a DIY artist residency in Oranienburg for 10 days, during which we manifested the first iteration of the tuning practice and performance.
Sprouting from a complex conceptual net, A Tuned Body traces the ley lines between personal queer and trans experience, intersectional environmentalism, and sympoietic ecology. The methodology of tuning emerged from our curiosity in learning to move in and out of shared consciousness. We live and breathe the rhizomatic nature of queer community in Berlin, in which each person proffers their own self-actualized authenticity, forming a lush creative ecology. We evolve (as queer individuals, and as a queer legacy) in deep entanglement with those in our community as well as with our non-human neighbors and with our environment; this sympoiesis of queer culture is a model which may inspire an Other future vision: one in which flux is embraced, in gender, in perception, in growth and degrowth.
The interrogation of one’s own gender, and the embodied knowledge of gender transition, unlock modes of thought that counter the Western cult of the individual. Global Northern Modernity silos humans in ‘Us vs. Them’ thinking. But when we allow ourselves to become Them, we realize that such separations are a mirage created by hegemony and domination – xenophobia manifested through contemporary colonialisms, capitalism, ecocide, and through queerphobia. Therefore, dissolving the Narrative of Separation (Christian Wahl, 2018) is not only a queer act, but an ecological one, inviting us to see our interrelations within the whole planetary body, and our shared lot in its evolution – when sympoiesis, through engorged scale, becomes an autopoietic entity. As Donna Harraway (2016) terms it, this process of ‘becoming-with’ urges a collaborative future view in which humans no longer dominate the life hierarchy.
Winding back towards our research and worldbuilding of A Tuned Body, we ask: “What might we learn in time spent outside of our individual, human perception? What lessons lie in the experience of being an organ, to contrast our baseline knowledge of being an organism? How might we learn to relate empathically (and emphatically) with the Other?” We therefore position this performance as more than a presentation of creative research through sound and movement; it is a piece of somatic-based storytelling of emergent queer ecologies, of a becoming-with process, which ropes together all who are present. This story makes the room an organism.
