I recently went to the Berlin retrospective of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, a pioneer of interactive and sensory art. It was delicious. It was enlivening. It was weird.
She moved from painting geometrical shapes and lines to the dealing with the messy language of the body; pre-verbal states, the soupy subconscious, blurry lines between inside and outside; man and woman; you, me, us.
She used touch, smell, sounds, and played with different ways of seeing. Her materials were often found objects turned into sensual play things. It reminded me of what children do, with the mud and the leaves and stones and shells, with elastic bands, bits of plastic, and sand. We live in a culture where toys have been manufactured and marketed for children to play with. But everything and anything can be a toy, and everyone can play. And play is essential — this is what Lygia Clark understood.
Her Sensorial Objects get people to feel their bodies more, enabling self-knowledge and creativity. Working during the Brazilian military government, Clark’s art was concerned with liberating people from the restrictions of their lives, their bodies, and their minds.
This idea of the ability to feel as a foundation for liberation reminded me of a line in one of my favourite Audre Lorde essays, The Uses of the Erotic:
For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.
This essay has informed my work over the last few years. If you have participated in one of my workshops, I have probably made you read it, or I’ve used the ideas behind it to guide your experience.
Like Lygia Clark, I have progressed from clean literary lines to the messy lines of the body, giving birth to my latest work: The Erotic Album.
The Erotic Album is an art and poetry book that comes with a digital spoken word album. It began as an exchange between two bodies in a room: Musician and composer Lutz Gallmeister’s body, and my body.
In 2024, we met regularly and let our bodies interact with each other through touch, dance, and deep listening, part by part…fingers, arms, tongues, heart. We then translated this sensual experience into our different art forms; Lutz into sound art and music, and I into text.
We wanted to feel deeply and let our bodies speak, because, as Audre Lorde expands, “when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s.”
Our bodies did speak. Its sentences ran like veins and arteries, (inter)connecting, looping back on themselves. Softness spread. Thoughts scattered. The sounds of the erotic — from rolling waves to orgasms — formed a soundscape; our tender hearts, pulsing beats.
Monika Kozub (Berlin Boudoir), an artist whose own work has also been informed by Audre Lorde’s essay, then created a visual album to accompany these sound poems.
Together, we made this art and poetry book, published by queer Berlin publisher FLORETS. We are delighted to be launching this book and the digital album this Friday, 10th October, at Lettrétage with a performance to connect you to your senses and feelings. Come and hear our sound poems as Monika Kozub’s visual art unfolds, accompanied by smells created by olfactory artist Klio Maniati. You can find our more and grab a ticket and book here.
It will be delicious. It will be enlivening. It will be weird.
If you cannot come to the launch, you can follow us and download the album via Bandcamp. It contains explicit content, so if we are related, or if you have children around, or it’s not your thing, maybe skip it. But if it is your thing, I hope it will touch you and move you. At a time when non-sense and numbness a threat to our humanity, moments that focus on the complexity of the erotic, the feeling self, and the sensual body are essential.
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