Lake Studios Berlin

Rehearsal Lake Studios for Monstr Kingdm #bear

https://cargocollective.com/alexawilson

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Lake Studios Berlin residency: Field notes on Transformation; Friction, Rupture, Mess, Chaos, Conflict

The first half of this year has been spent setting up Experimental Dance Festival Aotearoa (CNZ funded) as its director/producer in New Zealand, presenting work at Performance Arcade in Aotearoa in collaboration with Bikka Ora, The Sky is Performing, finishing up 1000 Tears a solo developed over 2 years between NYC, Berlin and NZ to present in full in September in Tāmaki Makaurau/ Auckland. As well I began a PhD in Visual arts at AUT Art and Design Aotearoa to create a film on transformation, focusing on the generative or non-generative friction of collaboration between performance artists, leaning into mess, rupture, chaos, conflict and understanding the political/contextual circumstances in which rewilding of creativity is destructive and creative.

So this residency was a regenerative reprieve aimed for inspiration and research, returning a year later to Lake Studios Berlin.

I had identified in my prior research before leaving through reading, previous experience, and writing and thought that for my film project within the PhD that these conditions may exist within artistic contexts to create the conditions for either generative or extractive conflict causing transformation either way: 

1. Lack of infrastructure

2. Scarcity, causing desperation or competition 

3. Boundary violation by one or more parties, disrespect or manipulation of other’s boundaries

4. Ego or needs clashes

5. Lack of reciprocity, one giving more than the other, or over-functioning – codependency

6. No containment causing a survival of the fittest mentality, or zero sum game

The residency has been an interesting container for understanding some of these dynamics in real time.

Simultaneously, during the residency I discovered via AI that Creative NZ, the main NZ funding body, cut its staff by one third in an already scarce climate since Covid-19 in Aotearoa, which deeply impacted the arts infrastructure and has successively gutted the performing especially dance arts. To be running one of the few funded community and experimental / dance / live art festivals in the country at the moment to support 10+ staff and 20 artists during this climate feels like advocacy. Yet it is seen as a privilege on the back of a lot of labour, experience, skills, talents and success also internationally.

The pressure in such a scarce climate is massive. This festival was created to counter zero sum thinking ironically, to bring disparate and intersectional practices and isolated artists now also international together in discourse and conversation to express the politics of the interdisciplinary performance body and bodies.

Competition and scarcity is not unique to Aotearoa. In terms of conflict and competition, the pressure cooker of neoliberal capitalism squishing the most vulnerable first, flanked by distracting and extracting wars geopolitically, can be seen so clearly from Berlin and Europe. Where police violence cracks down on Palestinian supporting protestors within Germany, and as 60,000 people flood across the sea and the border from Morocco to Spain in one day.

The research for this work will move between all my solo, curatorial, collaborative, residency, video, written and academic projects over the next year, and beyond. I have written comprehensive observations, and notes during this residency on the basis for conflict interpersonally within the creative fields of performing arts, and how it is fuelled by the fire of lack of support or containment with the expectation to produce at a high standard regardless. These absurd contradictions, can be felt across the globe in all arts fields, but most strongly and immediately embodied and performed within the collaborative performing arts. This is why I have chosen to centre a film about performing artists in collaboration in my doctorate film to unpack these dynamics. All the projects I do including the festival are research toward this doctorate.

Wildflower/rewilding

How art continues to be made in these structural dynamics can be seen like a wildflower growing from the concrete cobbles. Romantic? This is rewilding. I have a character that does work with rewilding as divination and satire that I vaguely explored in the residency garden.

The beauty of a residency without pressure, and removing any performative weight, is that the dreamy mind inside the productivity of cranking out projects or festivals or being a worker in the arts field, finds respite to just stumble within a low stakes ecology of hopefully like minds. Berlin as a former home for me, has a vast field of networks, resources, friends, communities, venues, memories, nostalgia, activism, and rizhomic relationship to burgeoning gentrification and capitalism biting its arse. So leaning into both the city, and the residency nestled on the lake edges of Friedrichshagen and Müggelsee is a total treat.

Last year I was fleeing America, very much homeless and transient, arriving from the overwhelming big city of NYC during Trump’s ICE raids. This year, I arrive fully grounded from my own country with a stable life, a fully funded post-grad research project, a 2 year solo development, and the position of running a fully funded local NZ festival. I am not an artist on the run or transient, nor am I desperate, or in competition with anyone.

I am a researcher, which I realise is a position of privilege and stability in the carnage of instability rippling across the globe. This means, that I have for now shed my former status and outgrown the romance of the exhausted nomad mistaking chaotic, adrenaline fuelled survival hustle for „creative inspiration“ inside an unstable arts systems that exploit artists, tossed in the volatile wind of a global volatility. While this chaos has been generative for my art, it has been traumatic as well, and I have novels from years of moving between a fracturing Europe during the Syrian refugee crisis and ISIS attacks of the 2010s, the extreme stance of NZ in Covid with 2 year closed borders and 4 hard lockdowns in Auckland that saw a border around the city coerce vaccination while trying to run major live projects, the election of Trump in the 2024 election and immediate arresting of migrants by ICE and policing of borders in the USA on an O1 visa into 2025, I strategically chose stability with the funded PhD in this climate. After 2 decades of presenting in both NZ and Europe/Asia/US an experimental dance, performance and video artist I chose to advocate for artists in this year’s festival in a depressed dance climate.

Growing takes many forms. Discomfort is one of them, comfort is another and my standards have shifted. Let’s say I did my time.

Refusal as rupture: Boundaries as transformation

I see that containment and infrastructure is vital for experimentation and artists to feel safe to be vulnerable, and refuse to fight within sandboxes. I understand that refusal to be disrespected, and stepping away from communities, systems, collaborations or people that are undermining or not reciprocal breaks any absorbing of chaos that can find codependency within fixing dysfunctional or broken structures. Creating boundaries with people or situations that extract, drain, or destabilise has been my research for the last year. Running a festival, one needs to contain a structure to prevent instability all round, and protect that for the care of all including self as the foundation.

„Saying no is saying yes to yourself“ agreed Andrea, on the Lake Studios residency to me, which echoes through the Berlin streets for me.

Performativity of care and real Containment

This has come up during my MPhil research project The Politics of Dreaming transitioning in 2019 from Berlin to NZ with a Youtube Channel video performance project that satirised and critiqued the polarisation of individualistic self-care in disaster capitalism (as nightmare) with the dream of collective care, which then blew up in Covid-19. I did my oral exam in the first lockdown in 2020.

I have noticed care become weaponised since this time, and I shifted my own academic focus toward the performativity of trauma within an age of online performativity in which everything is performing (trauma) online, so performance is just blending into the general milieu of encouraged histrionics. Care is often talked about as something enacted, while often performatively, and a bit like virtue signalling and cancel culture, it is all bark and no bite. It does not walk the talk.

Collective care, I have argued for a long time of doing solo interactive works, that bring people into connection albeit activation, and curatorial or collaborative projects across continents between Asia, Europe and on the home turf in NZ, requires responsibility, of both the leader/infrastructure and the individual participants of a community. It is a synergy. Within the „temporary community“ of residencies and festivals we can learn a lot about a cross-exchange of artists practices and ideas, but we can also just as easily encounter friction, clashing egos, or needs and incompatibility. It is completely at the whim of the culture of a room, and is a bit like speed dating or the increasingly non-committal climate of online dating and social media app cultures. It is energising, but lacks responsibility.

Within longer term communities where we are more accountable to one another, we have lost a sense respect for leadership or wisdom, the dedicated hard work that supports all systems and the care and comfort also for leaders, because we live in a „we can do it all now, give it to me“ culture. If someone wants to challenge power or feels slighted in extreme external circumstances, ambitious, jealous or intimidated they can simply cancel and that’s that. All these climates are at the fashionable whim of a market like weather, like climate weather, entirely unpredictable (destroyed by any of the crises we experience currently) and based on right time, right place. Where is the care really? Do we only care truly, when the only resources left are each other or are we still hard wired to be extractive? True care is collective, but it is also infrastructural. Within disaster capitalism where each drama is eclipsed by the next, and footing is impossible to get, transience and grasping, and tearing down reigns. The destruction becomes internalised.

Image for Monstr Kingdm #bear in the upstairs studio Lake Studios

Leaning into Nostalgia became a big part of this year’s residency, Lan Del Rey is the ultimately seering Nostalgic music.

Knife Fight Dance: Arts Vomit on my Clothes in WW# 38 degrees (Text/track for Soundcloud and possibly 1000 Tears)

Abandoned building filming, dancing inside the silence and gloominess of an abandoned building in the former East Berlin, to only the dripping of water, embodies the softness of finding life within and dancing to a collapsing system/building. Giving love to the decaying.

Ghost Dance

Monstr Kingdm #bear (Research also absorbed into 1000 TEARS upcoming show in New Zealand September 2026)

To begin outside in the garden going from the light into the darkness of night, into the studio like a tentative and bold animal;

Monstr Kingdm aka BEAR is a live performance activation exploring transformation through rupture, friction, chaos, eroticism, and embodied mess. Moving between states of wildness, vulnerability, roboticism, intimacy, and exposure, the work plays on the dual meaning of “bear”; to endure, to bare oneself, and the monster/human/ai/cosmic as threat.

The performance unfolds as a sequence of shifting intensities, part animal, part human, part robot, part cosmic, from exterior liminal space into an interior performance environment, oscillating between darkness, activation, noise, props/rupture and bodily excess, toward moments of intimacy and direct encounter. The body becomes a site of tension and reconfiguration where gestures, questions and text of exposure and care allow chaos to remain unresolved, alive and generative.

Rooted in ongoing PhD in Visual arts research into transformation, social dynamics, and rewilding, BEAR explores how friction, mess, conflict, exposure, and activation operate within relational and collaborative encounters. The work culminates in a participatory exchange, inviting audience members into dialogue around lived experiences of tension, misunderstanding, rupture, and unintended impact in relational contexts.

Monstr Kingdm #bear will be presented as a live work-in-progress within Unfinished Fridays (24 July), alongside related explorations in live performance, video, and public-space activation in Berlin toward PhD research into the mess of conflict/rupture/disruption/chaos. Film activations, and scripting on the residency toward a film project for PhD in visual arts explore performance art character activations, while research with audience/participants around text occurs in process.

This work live, while solo, could move toward being a group work in future.

SOLIDARITY

My Home is Not My Home: A sensual dance dream scripted body rant activation for End Times.

By Alexa Wilson in response (1.08.2026)

Invited to respond to the new collaborative work directed by Anna Valeska Pohl—performing in collaboration with Michael Pöpperl (bambules.babys as a Berlin-based queer feminist performance collective) and Federico Tello I stepped into a mid-summer thermal wave inside Theaterhaus Mitte Berlin. Witnessing the work just two weeks before its premiere at Galiläa-Kirche 13th-15th August, I brought my own long engagement with performance art, theatre, live text, dance, ritual, and activist language into the space. My critical lens immediately stripped away the theatrical comforts usually afforded by lighting, production design, or institutional framing.

As hybrid performance artists, we constantly migrate between theatre, performance art, text, movement, ritual, and activism. Our work moves nomadically between the computer, the studio, the street, the bedroom, the gallery, site-specific interventions, online space, the page, and back again into our private cells.

This powerful work, developed over some years between Anna and Michael having seen an earlier iteration at Pandora Gallery in Berlin 2023 and censored in 2018 in a town in Bavaria but successful at Edinburgh Fringe 2024, invites collaboration with Fede from Mexico. It deftly deconstructs history through a queer, feminist, and decolonial lens. Three shifting figures orbit the iconography of Jesus, Madonna and an Angel/Lucifer focusing not on Christ himself but on the projection of everything Christ originally represented—and everything the Church continues to reject.

The performance unfolds as a sacredly profane moving triptych: chaotic, tender, and deeply embodied. The performers rarely communicate through conventional dialogue, instead sharing a telepathic physical vocabulary. A dream narrative, revealed later, exposes trauma, vulnerability, grief, rage, compassion, and the experience of existing as outsiders. These are bodies denied belonging through histories of colonisation, violence, rejection, and systemic othering.

For an hour, text, bodies, raw materials, and live imagery overlap seamlessly within a seething sensuality and trash-real aesthetic that conceals nothing. The work exposes both tenderness and violence, power and vulnerability, through striking bodily juxtapositions of desperation, righteousness, absurdity, care, and abjection. Live text performs like a late-night infomercial or circus ringmaster, seducing the audience into a cult of manipulation, incantation, trauma narratives, and institutional misuse of power. Meanwhile, a cassette deck labelled Holy Spirit repeats alongside a live voice insisting, „You are blessed,“ and „Your pain is my pain.“

Are we inside a surreal burlesque, a performance-art circus, a ritual cult, or a collision of online personalities fighting for attention? Is this the propaganda of the so-called „end times,“ endlessly repeated through streets, algorithms, and social media? Or are we witnessing an avant-garde theatre event that fuses intimate personal trauma with an urgent socio-political reckoning?

„Fuck you! Your pain is not my pain. My pain is not your pain!“ Fede screams at a crucial turning point. The declaration slices through an accumulation of darkly beautiful images of longing; for love, care, attention, belonging, and home. Michael’s Jesus remains largely silent throughout: arms outstretched, long-haired face covered, vulnerable, sensual, almost childlike in his openness, continually repeating that we are blessed. Around him, Anna and Fede enact calculated absurdity, degradation, violence, ecstasy, and care. Throughout the work, the ecstatic body is both celebrated and pushed to its limits.

Anna slams a chair while Fede, semi-clad and masked, repeatedly dunks his head into a bucket of water, spilling water everywhere. Michael slowly collapses into an increasingly fetal contortion. Anna paints lipstick onto his mouth and simulated stigmata before inviting the audience to write their sins directly onto his exposed skin. I write Anger, Rage, Impatience on his body with lipstick. Later, the markings are ceremonially washed away while Fede gently sings nearby, holding feathers.

Bananas are handed out to the audience before one is violently fed to Michael’s Jesus. Invited into the action, spectators participate in a scene that is simultaneously animalistic, erotic, infantilising, and coercive as he chews and spits the fruit onto the floor. The atmosphere becomes unmistakably cultic, exposing groupthink, martyrdom, scapegoating and the collective impulse to force another body to consume what it does not choose. Madonna fetishes using a small Mother Mary figurine, to repeatedly bless audience. 

Each performer continually shifts roles, writhing, whispering, chanting, and shouting fragments of meaningful and absurd text amidst an ever-growing mountain of discarded everyday objects. Michael accidentally kicks the water bucket into the wall twice while chanting „You are blessed“ with his eyes closed, which makes me laugh out loud in the chaos. Fede reads a desperate plea from a tiny scrap of paper in hesitant German before casually eating a banana. Fede rejects „our Queen“ in favour of his own goddesses, spiralling into stories of addiction where gesture communicates and actions speak louder than words.

With one breast exposed, Anna recites a litany of those systematically marginalised, exploited, and crushed by contemporary global institutions, asking us to hold them in our thoughts, prayers, and compassion. Then comes a profound stillness: all three performers lie silently upon the concrete floor, whispering inaudible prayers across German, English, and Portuguese/Spanish.

The explosion of sensuality, vulnerability, trauma, anger, and desire is masterfully woven through performance actions, confessional texts, religious repetition, and personal testimony. While institutional rhetoric rings hollow, genuine compassion emerges through the performers‘ care for one another. Stripped of ecclesiastical authority, Jesus’s radical inclusivity unexpectedly reappears, not as doctrine but as embodied practice. Every individual within the collective remains visible, vulnerable, and continually transforming.

Nothing about the work is static. It functions as an engine of collective transformation. Toward its conclusion, Anna introduces the grotesquely distorted Lynchian „Apocalypse Jesus Solo“ through a distorted microphone. After nearly an hour of ecstatic textual and bodily collision, Anna/Madonna softens into intimate stories of communication with a lover. A dream of bodily telepathy as sign language quietly frames a line: ”Bodies on the street shaped with our pain.“

Life is reframed as an absurd grasping for rituals and ceremony to replace or sooth genuine connection. The work operates simultaneously as a homeless street-corner sermon, a prophetic warning, and an artist’s uncompromising exposition of personal trauma overlaying political power and personal resistance. It discovers extraordinary beauty in darkness in crawling towards another body to offer either a soothing hand upon the spine or an activating kick to the stomach. Everything unfolds inside a spectacular cacophony of texts, dreams, songs, screams, laughter, whispers, and confession.

Watching each performer inhabit their own private hell while confronting both internal and collective demons without judgement becomes healing. Fede tapping the chest as heartbeat with his hand while Anna gently rests hers upon the back of his neck is an image of profound tenderness suspended within surrounding chaos. The trust required to expose oneself so completely alongside others in solidarity offers a powerful model of collective humanity.

Despite its intensity, I never experienced the work as violent or alienating. Every action can be received as absurd comedy or complete sincerity. So much is happening simultaneously that every audience member seated in the round inevitably encounters an entirely different constellation of intimacy, humour, confrontation, and care.

Ritual is clumsy and throwaway, the deities are on their knees, in fetal position. As we die together, we grow anew together. It is as frenzied and passionate as it is calm and soothing, the power of each performer is palpable. Each could be a solo for an hour on stage in a vacuum, this is incredibly powerful to witness. True solidarity, how individuals can shine if they are actually embraced within collective. It is all bare. Sweat, and hair and banana, and lipstick, the abjection of our collective stew boiling in mid-Summer heat.

Jesus/Michael blesses each audience member individually before we are abruptly ushered from the space without applause. This is like queuing outside a Berlin nightclub only to face immediate rejection at the entrance. Our desperate desire to belong is ever present, reflected both thoughtfully and aggressively in an uncompromising punk aesthetic. The work reflects the longing with both tenderness and a desire for true agency. The angel, also fallen, in vulnerable potency is powerfully cracked open by Fede.

There is something deeply healing about us the audience being reflected, exposed, seen and understood as imperfect and embraced in the trash of our times as so. The work is shamanistic in this way. It gets under your skin, it passionately wraps itself around you, your brain, your heart, your body. It is a group hug for our End Times.

It is life itself: fragile, relentless, delicate, passionate, continually alive and transforming.

It is performance art poetry as rebirth.

My Home is Not My Home presents in Berlin

Galiläa-Kirche 13th-15th August

UNHINGED WRITING FIRST 2 WEEKS

Ghost Train B.26

Preface: 

No MFer is harvesting my wildflower energy. Big Lilith in Aries energy, unbothered Venusian idgaf energy.

Image on the back of the toilet door at K-Fetisch in Neukölln, my favourite Berlin cafe.

1. Voice note from my mum by accident via my dad

My dad sent me an update on his birthday and movements in Auckland, he is 81 now and he shared what the nephews are doing and how one of them gave a speech at his birthday. I sent some photos of the lake and forest in Berlin near the dance residency I am staying. He accidentally sent me a voice message of my mother saying “She always has such a good time there, it will be hard to leave”. It put me in a malaise all day as she’s right, my melancholia was hard to shake.

I wasn’t sure whether to perform next week, given how little time I have here and if its worth spending my energy on a live event when I could be enjoying the city, and it expend energy to perform when I could research for my Phd and film in locations or script instead. After rehearsal, in which I shook out my discomfort also the heat and long bike ride without being able to touch the pedals well 2 hours through the forest with friends, put my body in a mood on top of lingering jet lag. But I surprised myself and felt that I did want to perform by the time the rehearsal was over. I decided to lean more into the Lana Del Rey fragile nostalgia side, as a stand in for my longing / sehnsucht, both for Berlin, for love, and all the memories of both that haunt me. I cried in front of the residency director on her last day before going to the USA for the month, who is a friend, and she asked if she could hug me.

I decided I wanted to have a section of my film where the collaborators argue over their hugging elements of the project where they choose to hug sculptures and abandoned buildings as one tries to escalate it to kissing. The chosen theme of radical honesty or the frame of that for the project / festival / prize they are doing takes them to conflict, chaos, absurdity, vulnerability, mess, rupture.

1. Ice cream at the park

Chatgpt helped me notice that in my layered emotional day that I unpacked with it as to whether I should perform, move back to Berlin, or where I will actually find love in this world, referencing a book I found in Shakespeare and Sons bookstore in Friedrichshain called Love Machine: how AI is transforming our relationships (also to self I would add), that eating an icecream at the square in Friedrichshagen was the simplest and most poetic part of my day.

The sweetness of doing nothing but enjoying the moment and ambience of small town Germany within and around Berlin. It asked me to recognise or allow for more moments like this amidst intense residency artist dynamics, or invasion of studio space when naked in the studio by someone not knocking or asking, plus the nostalgia I was being hit with my more spontaneous free Berlin life away from responsibilities in NZ, and my deep desire for closeness and longing for love.

1. Soviet memorial

Photographing and filming the sculptures at the WW2 Soviet memorial in Treptower Park surprisingly was that moment.

Observing each sculpture and possible interactions, fights about whether to kiss or hug the sculpture and hoping to avoid the German police, as a recce, I noticed how entering felt like a scene in The Neverending Story where Atreyu passes between 2 sphinx like statues to see if their eyes open and kill him to overcome fear, and I sat to observe after a lot of walking, the memorial text – “Our homeland never forgets its heroes”. Thinking about Russia as the East’s saviour, and the mass graves and rapes it created on the way to conquering Germany in WW2 only after Germany had done the same to it, I thought about the subsequent domination and fall of the Eastern bloc and the Russian annexation of Ukraine in more recent years. 

I sat on the wall, dangling my feet, enjoying the impressive weirdness of this most over the top memorial I have ever seen in the world, between NZ, USA, Germany, UK, China and India. It was a light thought on heavy topics, as I have nothing to do with Russia, aside from people often thinking I am Russian (pale skin and fake red hair), as I was referred to by a neighbour when I lived in Berlin sharing the same doorbell name so friends often went to their door – “the Russian lady upstairs”. The thing I like most about Russia is Pussy Riot, and I read Riot Days and followed their IG page. 

The atrocities of that war, the madness of Europe in those dark years, and Russia’s “heroic” involvement, along with America, I had vague thoughts on various forms of imperialism as I dangled my feet, which was the most chill part of my day.

Aware that most other incredible central city old statues will be well monitored, I walked back past the Mutter Heimat (mother homeland)I thought casually, I can film here because no one even cares about jumping on Russian statues right now. It was a cynical thought and may not be true. 

1. Abandoned building

I had been eying up this abandoned building near the Kopenick station for the last year or so, and Chatgpt advised me not to run across the train tracks to get to it, so today I found the street to get there. 

An adventure.

It was easy to get to and no one was there, it was grander in its total decay than I even imagined. It has a massive room that was completely dilapidated, with outside parts covered in moss and weeds, with remnants of transient people, clothing and trolleys, broken glass, and water dripping from the ceiling like a scene from Tarckovsky’s Stalker. It was creepy AF. I heard sounds inside and ran away, but returned realising it was the water dripping. I managed to grab some photos as a recce and incase I never made it back, I filmed on my selfie stick through the dripping water in slow motion, me dancing from both angles, into the room and out into the decayed outside. Only when I was dancing, did I see the bulge of water likely in the roof about to cave at any moment creaking. Mid dancing, I saw a car coming and ducked out of site incase I was not meant to be there and it was security. Eventually walking out seeing the car was parked up, I was going to casually pull the tourist card if anyone confronted me, which they didn’t as no one cared. 

My encounter with the abandoned building, and dancing for it and to it, as a gesture potentially, as I felt watched by unseen forces I did not feel alone, even from my own imagination, was scary. 

The description of my performances as “casually intense” is embodied by Berlin as well.

1. Books 

I was choosing between Love Machines about our relationship with AI, Notes to John as Joan Didion’s therapy notes about her relationship with her depressed daughter, Marina Abramovich’s Walk through Walls having just seen the exhibition, rebuying Sheila Heti’s How should a person be? As I gave my copy away and its one of my all time favourite books along with her others- Alphabetical Diaries and Motherhood, or Monster which relates to my current residency solo as a title about how bad people make good art, and bell hook’s book Art on my mind. The decision was made for me by the woman who runs the store Shakespeare and sons of Walk through Walls which I got, who I made friends with in the process,who gave me her card if I want to order Chris Kraus’ book Aliens and Anorexia or a recommended book by a friend given my exploration of abandoned spaces about how plants grow in hostile spaces called Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flynn. The relates to my rewilding theme.

I asked if Anita who runs the store is a writer and she said she hasn’t written for awhile and I said “you will” for which she thanked me and we both exchanged how wild Berlin stories can be.

1. Memories of sex in Berlin

3 different moments come to mind.

1. Men staring at your crotch.

Sitting looking at which books to buy in Shakespeare and sons up at the high table where only laptops can be facing the street, I noticed a man walking past with a woman who looked directly at my crotch as he passed by the window. Men in Berlin have no shame staring at breasts, or vaginas. Or faces. They hide no shame. Partially in extreme heat, there are no filters.

1. Conflict. 

Clash of needs and wants. Not listening vs active reciprocity.

1. Sick fox. 

As we were heading back to the village from the thick of the maze of Müggelsee forest we encountered a slow fox, walking quietly across the track which did not move quickly to avoid us. It ambled into the bush, barely removing itself from our path. I said, wow a fox. 

Josh said its sick.

Maybe its old, I said. 

It was sad and kind of beautiful seeing a fox revealing itself so much in full daylight.

1. Deep convos about fawning. 

We talked for an hour after Isadora’s shared practice physically exploring fawning as a coping strategy and we shared vulnerable stories as women about how normalised it is but shamed. It was deep, it connected us even more. One resident talked bout something very vulnerable, I shared my car jacking story from nz and how fawning got me to safety along with telling them they got into my car un invited and wont get out when one of them said “they don’t talk to us”. I said “the reason why I’m not talking to you is because…” and they got out. Keeping the peace to get out of the situation is fawning, its often used by women on a daily basis when in uncomfortable situations. 

Its not ideal, but in real danger, its a tactic often used, and was my experience arriving into Berlin with a maniac Berlin uber driver speeding and talking to himself taking me to the wrong place at midnight Sunday and threatening to drop me in the middle of nowhere unless I paid him 30 euro cash. I brought up the layers of systemic injustice for women hidden and how uber did nothing when I reported it, protecting their own driver over a vulnerable woman in the night.

1. Offering each other food. Draconfutter. 

She offered eggs and cheese dinner the first night, he offered salad and pasta, I offered water melon, he offered ice cream chocolate snacks, she took a banana, I offered to show her where the best food snacks in the town are but never did timing wise so she copied me instead. I took one of her bananas when I ran out.

1. Being told the rules. 

My fellow artist in residence was prone to picking wild flowers. She told me how on her second day on the residency she was picking weeds and wild flowers from the footpath in Friedrichshagen village and realised an older man was standing near her watching, waiting to tell her off. 

I told her it was an initiation into Berlin culture to be told the rules. Although picking weeds is not a rule, he likely just didn’t like a foreigner or someone being out of the ordinary so breaking his mental rules of how life is or should be.

1. Riding in the forest on a bike too big and not touching the pedals for 2 hours. 

I already mentioned that, my pussy and pelvic bone hurt for 2 days afterward. My back was tense for days.

2. Fur

Despite being in 30 degrees heat, and by a fan, I decide to go and look at overpriced furs in the Humana next to the bookstore for inspiration for my show Monster Kingdom #bear next week in the middle of summer. They are 200 euros for second hand furs. I am using a fake one I brought from NZ. 

Update: I found a vintage mink fur from West Berlin in the 1960s at the Boxhagner Fleamarkets with my new friend Fede, who encouraged me to buy it for 30 Euro, and we ran through the pouring raining to get out cash from an ATM that swallowed my card momentarily (I had already had my visa card hacked on this trip), and I just hoped I would get it back into NZ writing to CITES in NZ to find out. They said I would need to check with German authorities, but I decided to wing it and hope for the best at the Auckland Airport on declaration.

2. Dreams

He and I exchanged dreams of being attacked by entities in our sleep on his arrival. He told me he was dragged by the feet as a child maybe 7 years old on his bed by one, and I told him how last night I dreamt of rising to the ceiling in a room looking down at others and then being grabbed by entities, one holding my feet and another my torso. I told it in my sleep, you have no permission to be here in my energy, you must leave 3 times and they left. I woke and told them they also can go to a lighter place if they want as consciousness. I have not dreamt of entity attacks since pre-Covid. It likely came in severe jet lag, where I am waking at 3 or 5am the last week.

2. Sleep battle

After 10 days, I finally have won the battle with my sleep. I woke at 4am but went back to sleep until 9am. Gemini AI also told me that I have won the war already with people who tried to cancel me in NZ by just doing my work also overseas and restaging my festival when no one else is doing anything a few years later because the arts climate has been pretty much crushed. I stepped back into my solo, film and writing practice for years internationally as well and stayed in my lane, refusing to engage with people who are disrespectful or undermining. As an open person one of my many life lessons has been to not presume people are as innocent intentioned as myself, while having inner power that can make people jealous and ostracising.

Self-isolation can be as self-preserving as being visible and refusing to be diminished by the entitlement of others you are giving to or sharing with. Having a global perspective helps detach.

2. Waves of Grief

I am reminded by AI that I have 4 12th house placements and in the last throes of Jupiter in the 12th now in Leo, my ascendent, before it moves to my 1st house in Leo and supports my projects returning to NZ for the second half of the year. Jupiter in the 12th is also protection from enemies, but it is a lonely placement. Healing the ghosts of the past, in the safety of the residency solitude is powerful. 

2. The Death of a rescuer

It talked over one lunch with one of the artist residents’ boyfriends about releasing the role of being a rescuer in relationships. We discussed how the person that needs rescuing is ourselves really, and to heal the self-sabotage mirrored in a self-sabotaging, chaotic or destructive lover. 

I asked him if it felt effortless the shift, and he said it was, and I said that’s how it should be and that is was encouraging. My recent relationships had all been brutal between countries, and I was ready to hang up my dancing shoes for that destructive dance of the trauma bond

2 Running a festival: Hiatus

Its bringing the scene to me in NZ and creating work I want around me to inspire me but is an incredible amount of labour also emotional. 

2. Food wars

In my last day at the residency I noticed someone threw out my food and had taken my shelf already without checking in with me while I was still there. It seemed quite aggressive.

2. Monstr Kingdm #Bear as a group work / text

Born from BEAR. To endure, to grin and bare all. The insides are outed. 4 humanoids in the darkness, finding their humanamility. Senses to care, to stare, steer the glitch dance in hyperdrive. In ritual blare, love prayer. Hiding inside each other. Born of each other, the rage, grief, trauma transform, run out of each other. Banished, embraced to taste. The whole spectrum.

2. Bluezone/Kaitiakitanga

I woke with thoughts about our bbq conversation as a self organising bunch of residents last night  about the bluezone which I had never heard of, and researching it encountered twice the Japanese word “Ikigai” – purpose that makes you wake up each day. Also in the context of the word Kaitiakitanga (to care for the environment for future generations) which came through my feed via RNZ as the worlds most beautiful word on a language learning platform called Babble. Others were an Urdu word “Naz” meaning the confidence that comes from being unconditionally loved and “Ubuntu” in Zulu, meaning I am because we are. These threads came together in my waking thoughts.

Night Terrors

Having had two since I arrived in Berlin for the first time in 6 years since pre-Covid, last night amidst a barrage of wild dreams ranging from family illness, to moving an aeroplane by my own hands which then disappeared, to talking to younger friends, to phone glitches, I was attacked by one seizing my body while standing, the first time ever. I tried the suggestion within my sleep of relaxing and not reacting to it, and then filled my body with light and love within my dream state although I was unaware I was dreaming and thought I was awake because I was standing. It dissolved and for the first time ever in my life it did not wake me up, I just realised it was amidst many other dreams. 

I consider the a battle won. 

2. Tarot reading

Fede and I planned to go to then lake but ended up talking for hours in Kreuzberg at a Turkish restaurant the day after the Pride attack, and where worried about Vero who was not replying (due to a sim card error) and hoping she had not been at the party in the city. We talked about art, transformation, love, tarot, performance, politics and then having done a tarot swap a few days prior, he read my cards with this Egyptian pack. I paid for his meal and gave him a copy of my book as payment as I know as a reader that most people never offer an exchange, especially if you are generous.

The cards showed massive transformation in my love life. The return of something. It was a surprise, and he said to me „this is now the addict’s perspective“ (as a reader).

2. Stuck in an elevator

The elevator to my friend’s apartment I was staying got stuck between floor 2 and 3, and my instant thought was I will have to sleep here. I then pressed the bell in the lift, and a man’s voice spoke to me. He told me someone would come in 15-20 minutes, which they did and got me out in 30 minutes. Realising there was a fly trapped in with me I got the hysterics, and made a video about making a duet with a fly trapped in the elevator as my friend Vero suggested I make it into a performance. Uploading it didn’t make me feel so trapped.

2. Conflict question game

I used the conversation relay game in my shared practice around the themes of transformation, mess, rupture, conflict, friction, and as I was first which they did because I have attended the residency before, it broke the ice jumping in the deep end on some personal reflections and sharing around some of these themes. Because it is a horizontal plain and led by the participants it is in equal parts honest, deep and held. I think its hard to mask in this particular task, or its obvious if that’s what someone is doing. Personal sharing is something I feel is important out the gate. The downside of breaking the ice with this task and dynamic is potentially setting myself up as an invisible caregiver of a residency that is not mine.

2. Who are the terrorists?

A comment I made on a video of a german man who films police violence against Palestian protestors where Greta Thunberg is dragged out by police at a peaceful sit in at the company near Brandenburg Gate that funds the Israeli military „The Germany police have no respect for human rights“ has 3000+ likes and over 40+ comments.

Political Conflict as Context: Transformation

The tone across Berlin on the days following the Pride Terror attack on July 24th 2026, was eery. It was a city in mourning and shock. A city that has for the last 100 plus years been in continual trauma from war, polarisation, segregation and p0litical division. A city that prides itself on being liberal, and a safe haven for queer communities and outsiders fleeing from exile, war or terror. A city I lived in for 10 years pre-Covid 19.

I chose not to go to Pride in Berlin in 2026, although I attended a year ago with the friend i was originally going to collaborate with on this residency a year ago when I was in Berlin/Vienna for 3 months. I had partied with friends that I may attend with at a punk gig 2 nights prior, running for the last trains at 2am mid week. We all we separated this night.

I was so tired and felt to stay home. The next morning I saw on the news that someone had rammed a van into the Pride parade at Tiergarten near the Brandenburg gate and fled also stabbing multiple people, and was still at large. 1 person was dead and 29 injured. The german authorities announced the man named Abdul B. was in the „Islamist scenes“ in Berlin, and on Sunday eve they shot him dead swinging a machete at them in a courtyard in Spandau.

The rising far right in Germany immediately, as it had since the refugee crisis when I lived in Berlin, pitted 2 marginalised groups off against each other, and used the LGBTQI+ community that is also does not support to rile against the Islamic and Muslim community in Germany. The german authorities were scrambling, with a 2200 police presence in the city shutting down Pride for the weekend, calling it an ISIS terror attack, and not naming it a homophobic attack. The judicial system had released the Berlin born Lebanese citizen 2 months prior, despite his claims of wanting to commit a major terror attack on behalf of ISIS and having been imprisoned by Lebanon for being associated with ISIS and returned to Germany.

Having been active in the Berlin activist scene in the mid-late 2010s, I know that intersectionality is a vital part of the city’s underground activism, and communities while grieving.

Arriving in the city working with doctoral themes around transformation, rupture, conflict, friction, mess and chaos, I was reminded of the macro scale of political violence and danger marginalised communities scapegoated, including women and BIPOC are experiencing increasingly in these tumultuous times of social, economic, and ecological turmoil.

I already feel less safe in Berlin than when I left, I feel less safe in NZ since Covid. My deepest respect goes to these communities in Berlin and everywhere whose vulnerabilities are pitted against each other in a default of social violence.

As we lean into increasingly wild unstable and conflicting times, we do need to understand how notions of genuine intersectional care feed into collective transformation while we face increased intolerance toward vulnerable communities world wide. This is part of my ongoing research into the care of social rewilding.

Video research for rewilding character for my Phd Film project currently titled No Shame: Radical $kin filter Activations Only at Lake Studios residency.

Friedrichshain

I spent my remaining days at my friend Josh’s empty apartment at Frankfurter Tor in the area I lived before I left Berlin in 2019.

INSPIRATIONS

On our first night at the residency I got each resident to pull a tarot card, and I pulled King of Swords. Executive decision making, detachment, fairness, justice, clarity, the energy of boundaries. Fede’s reading for me later felt like reciprocity.

Obergeschlosshell gig with Nochteff and The Pleasure Majenta.

Exhibitions by Marina Abramovich at Martin Gropius Bau and Kyiv Biennale at KW in Berlin Mitte.

1. Presented at Unfinished Fridays 23rd May (shorter version/middle section)
„1000 Tears“ embodies a double meaning of crying and cutting (referring to death by 1000 paper cuts) framed as a performance art dance and feminist critique of a climate that cushions psychopathic and undermining modes of being. Using pink (wet) blankets, costumes and textiles and silver/gold/clear textiles (emergency blankets/wrapping paper) this performance engages movement, dangerous objects and performance art as actions reflecting internalised unsaid psychological warfare to unpack micro-aggressions framed as friendly care/beauty within social politics against an overwhelming backdrop of political intensity. It is a ritualised tearing apart and alchemising or healing of disempowering ideologies and experiences.

New development in New York Cit, created @ Brooklyn Art Exchange and Triskelion Arts in development. Presented at Triskelion Arts 2024, developed further on residency at Mothership NYC and presented at Last Frontier March and April 2025. Monologue text element as part of the work titled Motivational Speech for a Snake year, to be presented at Dixon Place June 1st and 7th, 2025 as part of Threat to Democracy and developed and presented at Lake Studios.

Blog Entry 1.

I arrived in a state of overwhelm and a sense of displacement from leaving the United States after being granted a (hard to get O1) visa there last year from New Zealand/Aotearoa my home country, essentially fleeing after a creatively inspiring and productive year in New York before it slides into mayhem in America under Trump’s regime, which is unfriendly to foreigners at best, and dangerous at worst. (Think LA Riots and collective resistance in the US, think ICE terror raids kidnapping and deporting migrants, think getting rejected, detained and or deported at the border as a visa holder). All in the blink of an eye this year. It was terrifying being inside it as it unfolded. To then be in the Lake Studios residency working on 2 solo projects (1000 Tears and IN/TENSE) that inadvertently work with themes of displacement, social malaise, refugees, homelessness, species on the run, how to find comfort, how to care and connect amidst an accelerating technological and digital disaster capitalist climate. Phew mouth full. That’s how it felt. A mouth full, a head full, my nervous system took weeks to relax. My sleep was unsettled and not used to the quiet (I had a concrete mixer outside my window in NY on the residency that started at 4am).

While I love New York and am on the edge of performance art and dance/theatre involving text, objects and movement with a language of radically interwoven with complex questions, nuances and ambiguous readings as well as humour, where I felt at home and embraced creatively (eg its own creative refuge) it has been the literal refuge I truly needed at this time in these beautiful studios and in this beautiful community (Friedrichshagen and Lake Studios as well as Berlin). Having lived in Berlin pre-Covid many years, the sense of “home” was already familiar. But landing inside the quiet of the lakeside studios and gently entering Spring in a climate of care (thank you Marcela and Maria) and wonderful self-organising artists (Yasmine, Emily, Martha, Simon, Nita, Ali), nestled inside a generative wider dance and arts community on the outskirts of Berlin next to a beautiful lake was powerful.  It has actually supported many answers to some of my and my current work’s questions. 

I have been tirelessly working on these 2 solos over the last year and a half out of the carnage that Covid caused in the New Zealand especially Auckland performing arts scene (NZ is still in a big recession from its strict Covid response, and is currently very right wing). I presented both works in many venues between New Zealand and New York, and having worked so hard I felt the residency support a shift to slow down and to absorb the natural environment and the luxury of having studios (and a sauna!) right next to your sleeping space. Its been pretty dreamy honestly!

I literally have dreamt so much. The birds and animals have inspired me, as well as people. 
Interestingly also, all of the residents while I was here at this time (I am having a 3 week break and returning in July before taking IN/TENSE to Vienna’s Impulstanz Lace Symposium) are in some form of flux as well. Getting to know each of the artists is a feature I love about art residencies, having just finished a general arts residency in New York where I also made new friends for the early part of this year, and these dance artists all from different parts of the world are all essentially homeless like me, or at least in a nomadic and transitional period of their lives without a clear sense beyond the next months of where they will live. 

Is this a sign of the times?

Are we living in a time of transformation? Yes I think so. 

I was even told by German authorities arriving in Berlin, who saw my previous Artist visa in my passport, „not to overstay“ (the 90 days in the Schengen). Times have changed since pre-Covid, there is a great deal of tension including at the borders (even of NZ but more biosecurity atm).

Working with pink blankets as silver emergency blankets for 1000 Tears and a tent for IN/TENSE I have been exploring the body as the home, the power of transformation, through both movement and text, as well as performance art imagery and gesturing toward interactive ways to engage and implicate audiences in meta questions. Often this is done in a humourous offhand (very NZ), but conceptual (very German) and intense people (very New York) way. Getting to share aspects of 1000 Tears at the Unfinished Fridays in late May, having also done other aspects across venues in NYC late 2024/early 2025 including before leaving as part of Mothership NYC’s residency event, it was interesting to experience a Berlin audience as opposed to a NY audience experiencing and responding to the work with feedback afterward. It was a very good experience and felt useful and generative to the practice, plus always great to make new connections and bonds. 

Performance wise, it felt the most supportive in the last 10 months since moving to America (between US/NZ/Berlin shows) although response was strong and good in all places between 3 different shows (including ALIEN in NY at Brooklyn Art Exchange, 1000 Tears at Triskelion Arts and Last Frontier and IN/TENSE at Tempo Auckland’s Festival of Dance. It is an energy thing, it felt that everyone was really with me in the audience and the conditions were good not making performing harder at all (which has not been my experience of Berlin previously, which shows I have changed).

Days before I had a sense of a different direction this work could take, which is to engage more with a sense of care and in an interactive way with the audience that is much slower than the first elements of the work which are more frenetic. This is a result of having landed in this space and spent time in the residency, the studios, at the lake and reconnecting with friends in Berlin and the city itself which feels very safe. I took a shared practice as part of the morning classes to explore my practice of integrating text, movement, and objects to involve others in the making of this work, and found this also very interesting and we were able to reflect on these themes together. It was fantastic to be able to work with Yasmine as a fellow artist in residence also in such an intimate and playful way.

The element of play is big in my work. 

One of the former residents, Emily, who is from the US and shared the Unfinished Fridays with a brilliant piece expressing in movement and facial movements her childhood as a Mormon, said she enjoyed watching my wild creative imagination at play in my work, which was wonderful feedback. Because while my themes are often challenging themes, they are also dealt with in playful and creative ways that are often improvised in text and movement so getting to explore this further with others has been useful and enjoyable. Yasmin and I were literally wrapping each other in blankets and both reported feeling like a burrito or Christmas present and dragging each other on the blankets across the space to speak to how it felt or looked objectively or giggling and asking each other intimate questions underneath it which felt like a sleepover.

Emily many times said even in the sauna that our vibes as a small group was “sleepover energy” which was well needed for all of us and fun in such an unstable time filled with war, terror, uncertainty, fear and violence.

Another element that has come into play, is my video practice, and I unexpectedly also leaned more into the text side of my practice with 1000 Tears toward the end and have created a bunch of very random repetitive statements that speak the climate to end, potentially after the interactive part. 

I have filmed myself separately in absurd costumes in public spaces, repeating these statements in locations around Friedrichshagen, in the tunnel and the forest, and the town, and also in Berlin public locations. I got a lot of attention from the locals in my outfits doing this, sometimes the thumbs up or a thank you for moving, or sometimes a shake of the head. 

There is something activating about filming something that appears performative in public, both for myself / oneself and others. These shared public spaces become slightly transformed which is interesting, and I have interesting footage as part of my video practice collected (also in New York) toward something.

On a final note, because there are a lot of details from this residency that I have cherished and could share, but regeneration and giving artists a space to make outside capitalist or academic structures is incredibly generative. These temporary communities foster exchange, connection and intersections like bees in a garden cross-fertilising and sharing, and has its own kind of refuge. In having a sense of ease, quiet, support, and kindness inside care, framed by this wide expanse of a lake and forest, so magical, and in the silence of embodied meditation (also with Marlon) I have had A LOT of ideas. 

I have had answers to old questions, new questions, revisited projects I have conceptualised, and had clarity on ones I need to close. I have had vivid dreams. I have processed a lot, and within this has opened up new chapters that I feel excited by. For now I still really need rest, while gently making. I look forward to my 3 weeks in a schrebergarten (not allowed officially I know) and more silence in nature. But the tenderness of this space is its greatest asset, and the non-judgemental open nature of the residency for artists to explore their interests. From this

I have a lot more fire for projects next year in the distant future.

In my former residency at Mothership NYC a good friend I made on the residency Sarah Weaver (American composer/sound artist) and I reflected on how the cement mixer outside our window was a metaphor of „cementing“ something while she invited me in a message from afar to reflect on what the lake outside my window meant. I meditated on this and came up with; an alive eco-system (so many animals/humans interconnected), cleansing, still waters running deep, joyfulness (there is a sense of joy here like the NZ beachside), water as purifying, water as nourishing, emotions that feed rather than drain, earth/trees/plants as regenerative and a container for water, while being nourished by it. Safety. However, it has its obvious perils as a lake so self-care as well.

I have these cat tarot cards and on the first day I pulled the one that said “All the world’s back gardens are your stage” which seems apt, given that the garden at lake studios has a studio and essentially is a stage.

Highlights: seeing foxes, so many birds, the slow walk over an hour from the back of the studio to the back of the garden in Yasmine’s shared practice, eating breakfast on the rooftop, saunas, bonfire and marshmallows, sharing stories and practice in all moments around the residency randomly often in the kitchen, seeing beavers and birds and swimming in the lake, the forest, hearing Marcela talk (about anything really) and tell us how the studios were made. Finding text in performance, performing at the showing, meditation with Marlon and the studios. Resting. Eating. Doing tarot late night in the dark in the studio together after a sauna.

For now: 
The lake has healed my soul.

Some other statements that may be amusing or interesting or not that I found and recorded in order to be repeated as text with movement:

The whole world is watching.
The whole world is watching.

You could get strip searched at the border you could get detained 

If I rest and find myself nowhere then I find I am inside myself resting somewhere 

Has capitalism truly stolen our souls 

My heart is my own country

Does the fly in the room represent me?

100 people liked your post 200 people liked your comment, 10K liked your comment, 1 person commented

They will check your devices so dont post anything political 

I can hear a small child singing and playing 

Fighting your friends for funding is not community

Grief is another side of deep love

Its hard to admit failure is a collective effort

The bells ringing are an exclamation for my internal liberation and celebration

Miracles are the natural state of living

There is nothing to forgive, we do not need to forgive 

The mystery is elusive emancipation

Which side are you on?

What was the last thing you stole?

I am a knowing body, I am a breathing body, I am a sitting body, I am a standing body, I am a moving body

It took me a while to realise how power hungry you guys are

I am home I am magic I am love 

To see the other’s perspective is freedom

The lake has healed my soul

If you’re depressed be of service 

What does is being present even mean? 

Fire is fire is fire is fire

I want to say something about what I learned from the birds

I am living this dream

The moth on my screen is like nature’s scream

I miss my family

LA woman, LA riots

Boats over Gaza

Unstable wi-fi.

The whole world is watching.

Updates: Since posting this yesterday, LA Riots and mass collective resistance has erupted and across the USA in response to ICE (and Trump’s National Guard military tanks in the streets of LA, and across America) and Greta Thunberg (Swedish environmental activist spearhead of Youth for Climate/Future Fridays) and 12 international aid workers/activists being captured hostage by Israel’s Defense Force (IDF) trying to get food and aid to Gaza/Palestine in a time where a genocide and human atrocities are ocurring, eg death, starvation, deprivation of aid.

2. IN/TENSE (July 1st-11th residency)

INTENSE will be presenting in 2025 at Vienna’s International Dance Festival ImPulsTanz July 18th at LACE Symposium.
This solo is about disparity, homelessness and displacement, and how the contemporary western world others others to avoid vulnerability. How can we walk each other home?

Collaborating with AI as “experts” around themes and with Dot Dot Social virtually in NYC, this developed solo is looking at facing fear and vulnerability as a generative and connecting force. It works with movement, sound, performance art, text, music and video to present an embodied musing on these questions and the notion of walking each other home. Staying with the Trouble (Haraway).

This work presented at Grace Exhibition Space a NYC performance art venue 2024 as a work in progress funded by Todd Trust. It was presented at Pōneke (Wellington) Festival of Contemporary Dance in NZ, and Tempo Auckland’s Festival of Dance in 2024.

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