THE LOVE LETTERS

  • art/work in the context of war
    I have always been working in a context of war, every day of my working life. That means i have been receiving money to survive in exchange for my labor while direct militarized violence, police violence, domestic violence and structural violence has persisted every day all around me near and far. in that context the only thing that ever changes is wars’ proximity to me — physical and emotional and economic and cultural and digital proximity to me. My ability to close my eyes to it, to continue existing (is this my chief function–to exist and to persist?) is some… Read more: art/work in the context of war
  • Why Speak about Extraction and Extractivism
    Why am I thinking about extractivism and what am I hoping to understand through this process? Part of what I would like to do is begin from a space of acknowledging that extractivist practices are inherent to most labour and creative processes, including my own. As a sound designer using field recordings–I may record the sound of an insect buzzing past me. The whizzing of its wings might become a synthesizer, made possible by a software that I was able to buy, to install on a computer which I was able to purchase. The synthesizer becomes the melodic lead in… Read more: Why Speak about Extraction and Extractivism
  • Extracting the Yes.
    Almost any exchange can be extractive. Although we might try to undermine extractive practices by so-called ethical practices such as obtaining consent through proof of signature and email trails of information, these practices may still obfuscate the extractive power dynamics or the possibilities of extractivist practices inherent in any exchange. I’m interested in the context of the consent acquisition and developing more nuanced and complicated language around the ecosystem of the consenting figures. I think this could help to explain or find language to a wide variety of extractivist exchanges, where consent is nevertheless involved, and still yet how uncomfortable,… Read more: Extracting the Yes.
  • worker artist
    No one in the Berlin underground calls themselves part of the free scene, but don’t take it from me. Despite having 16 solid years performing and over 1500 live show appearances, I seem to still have so much to learn except how to put on my face in 3 minutes flat. As far as I know, you might call yourself a freelance performance artist, but “Free Scene” is a word made up by people who circulate within or around the theater to speak of people who aren’t members of ensemble but still work from theater to theater. Or people that… Read more: worker artist
  • Why I like Aging
    Because I have experienced more different and varied contexts which shake my center of reality. Because I feel more confident in my body and in my identities even as they are shifting. I have a less self-conscious way of simply being and sitting in a room. My body has changed physical ways which seem to naturally reflect the queer and androgynous gender I have “felt to be” for a very long time. I have been presented with my own failures in the same or similar form repeatedly over and over. Though I can fix my mistakes, I have been given… Read more: Why I like Aging
  • not THE PROBLEM
    when i moved to berlin in 2004 exactly on this weekend my rent was 75€ for my room. i got a job dancing at sage club on the bar for 80€ on a friday or saturday night for four 45 minute sets between 11 and 3 am. No show preparation required–lets say 1 hour of costume making and maybe hidden costs of time spent keeping a body in shape (this is important and real), but otherwise just show up and dance. I remember all the details because i counted and saved every euro i made. now it is 2020 and… Read more: not THE PROBLEM
  • Making the Deadline
    When I was a young person, a teenager, and especially when I left grade school and finally had agency over my own education … I started to wake up to how fucked up the world is, always has been, creates and sustains violence. I understand that I played a role, consenting to it, as a citizen, as a tax payer, as a consumer and as a worker. I entered my twenties thinking that I didn’t want to live with that contradiction, that I would work actively against it. That in whatever work I did I would speak out against injustice.… Read more: Making the Deadline
  • This Morning Waking (2000 – 2020)
    EP and Essay Collection Purchase the EP: Mad Kate | the Tide – This Morning Waking HERE This Morning Waking. This morning waking, I will wake up, I will wake up, I will wake up, and it will be the clearest morning I have ever woken. I have been repeating this mantra for 20 years. I have been repeating, and failing, and trying again, and waking up and waking more and waking better. I have been failing to be awake. I have been oppressing and being oppressed and perpetuating my oppression and perpetuating the oppression of others. I have been… Read more: This Morning Waking (2000 – 2020)
  • Relations
    When the hard rain comes it leaks through the glass pained roof above my bed nook. It doesnt leak enough to fill buckets but it cries tears through the metal seams and lands in soft patches on my bed. I know that I have to go to the store tomorrow to buy clear silicon and then somehow get my ladder on the bed to reach the glass, which I’ve already imagined means dragging that long piece of plywood over and creating a kind of table top on the soft mattress. At least that’s the lazier way to do it. I… Read more: Relations
  • this is not a war this is a nonviolent protest
    this is not a war we are going through. this is a non violent protest a resistance. our bodies are on the line, not all of us, but some of us especially collectively those not on the front lines must pass them badly needed supplies must modify our own behavior to protect them we have been asked to sit patiently linking psychoenergetic arms waiting for hours, for days.   real actions are non violent: nurses and doctors fighting sleeplessly to save lives and scientists working tirelessly to find a vaccine grocery store workers, bus drivers, trash collectors–and others are maintaining… Read more: this is not a war this is a nonviolent protest
  • the anxiety from which i speak – part 2 quarantine
    When the quarantine hit a lot of things broke. Yes, the fear of death hit us, the fear of no work, the fear of survival, the fear of the future, the fear of not knowing. But also, for some of us—the stress broke. The anxiety of waiting broke. The feeling of being a dead person living—it broke. Feelings broke through the surface of coping mechanisms. Clarity broke through years of lack of sleep. Time to think broke through our busy minds to reveal looser tongues and new thoughts articulated in language and art. Sex and dancing revealed a sense of… Read more: the anxiety from which i speak – part 2 quarantine
  • Now more than ever: Digital Intimacies and Support
    To those who can support artists during this time, please remember that those of us who are living in the gig economy have lost all of our work and most of us have absolutely no safety set. All of my work for March has been cancelled, likewise for my family and friends. If there is any possibility of supporting us by buying that full album on bandcamp that you listen to on spotify, or buying the t-shirt you always wanted to have, or downloading our ebooks or other digital merchandise, please consider. To fellow artists–lets get creative, boost up our… Read more: Now more than ever: Digital Intimacies and Support
  • fear of performance.
    Speaking of “from which anxieties do i speak?” I think one of the anxieties from which I and others speak is a fear of performance. Performance, in this sense, is the fear of performing something which is not real. An idea which is interesting to follow, because it gets at something interesting about the word PERFORMANCE — which is that it implies fakeness. And yet, even in the word itself, in the english meaning, to “perform a task” means “to do a task,” where doing and performing are one and the same. In other words, performance is both fake and… Read more: fear of performance.
  • Proximities (thinking about different kinds of proximity)
    NOTES ON … PROXIMITIES …. Been spending a lot of thinking time with the word PROXIMITY. Realizing in the process that I should probably be using the word PROXIMITIES instead of just PROXIMITY to begin to get to all the different types of proximities that we feel. In which ways do we “feel close” ? Physical Proximity (to birthplace, to family, to Nationstate, to neighbors, to home, to a lover) creates relationships of physical, sustained connections that can be experienced through the physical body in unique ways. Within the idea of physical proximity we can also think about the myriad… Read more: Proximities (thinking about different kinds of proximity)
  • The Anxiety From Which I Speak – Thinking After Butler
    I have been thinking about the ideas Judith Butler presented when she lectured on 31st January 2020 at TU Berlin. Firstly, although it happened a seemingly off-the-cuff moment, they asserted their preferred pronoun as “they” (I found this quite historic) while speaking of the phantasmagoria of gender and the question of the pronoun (I responded to this in greater detail in a separate essay). Secondly, they spoke about trying to “understand the anxiety from which they speak,” the “they” being those who would desire to eliminate gender studies from the academy, as well as others who form coalition around actively… Read more: The Anxiety From Which I Speak – Thinking After Butler
  • queering
    what is queering ? queering our relationship to the rest of the world is not about how we have sex, although it can be. queering is about seeing each of our identities as uniquely placed, located, in larger structures and seeing each and every other person in the world as also uniquely located, as gendered bodies, as sexually oriented bodies, as bodies uniquely affected by our skin colour, by our ethnicity, by our class. Each of us are in unique relationship with the rest of the world. This is a “queer paradigm” because it is not uniformly binary, as was… Read more: queering
  • sitting in the earth and re-focusing
    View this post on Instagram A post shared by Mad Kate (@madkate27) on Feb 12, 2020 at 9:03am PST The context for this photo is despair and cloudiness. Throwing my bike down and going to the river. Well, the best “river” I could find. Whenever I feel at my worst I go to the river, I go to the water. And I go to my favorite trees. This is cold February, smelling the earth beneath my ass, feeling the cold ground. Grounding. This is where I am my most basic. Basic I mean elemental. This is not a pity party… Read more: sitting in the earth and re-focusing
  • Columns — Concentric Circles of Context
    Two things. one — although “products” or “works” may arrive on one date, their process is much longer. Columns began with a recording that took place in 2015, though one could argue that the process to get to that point took much longer. Many things have been part of why its arrival as “product” took so long, parenting being one of them, lack of money for works being another. two — Although I love the process of composing, I’m often “over” my own tracks by the time they come out, or they have lost something of the visceral first feelings… Read more: Columns — Concentric Circles of Context
  • Born Out of Sex
    born out of sex I was born out of sex lived in the body arrived through the cunt told I have a cunt that I will be desired that they will want to have sex in me and on my body to guard against sex to be a certain type of body there are certain things I should do or not do with my body I was told to refuse when they say yes I should say no no no!! but when I said no they said yes yes yes I was born out of sex lived in the body… Read more: Born Out of Sex
  • This Morning Waking, This Essay Waking
    This Morning Waking. This morning waking, I will wake up, I will wake up, I will wake up, and it will be the clearest morning I have ever woken. I have been repeating this mantra for 20 years. I have been repeating, and failing, and trying again, and waking up and waking more and waking better. I have been failing to be awake. I have been oppressing and being oppressed and perpetuating my oppression and perpetuating the oppression of others. I have been waking to the oppression and to the perpetuation of oppression and I am still waking and waking… Read more: This Morning Waking, This Essay Waking
  • Born Out of Sex – first single from This Morning Waking
    BORN OUT OF SEX; FIRST SINGLE OFF NEW EP: THIS MORNING WAKING DOWNLOAD BORN OUT OF SEX by MAD KATE THE TIDE The new single Born Out of Sex by Berlin post punk performance duo Mad Kate | the Tide is independently is released today, the 1st of January 2020. Born Out Of Sex is the first single off their forthcoming EP, This Morning Waking, which is a body of work – music, lyrical prose, essay, video and performance — that revisits some of Mad Kate’s earliest writings on rape culture and non-concentual sex, dating back to 2001. Her texts,… Read more: Born Out of Sex – first single from This Morning Waking
  • privacy intimacy performativity
    privacy whose privacy. when. how much. who can utilize it. who can weaponize it. which privacy infringes on boundary. which boundary is another persons trigger. when is capitalist individualism being branded as privacy. intimacy touching. physicality. being together in a room. it is powerful to be together in a room. it is powerful to touch another body. not all bodies want to be touched, in a moment or ever. touch is not always consent. performativity by performing and repeating performance we become more of what we are performing to be. by repeating what we mean to be through the process… Read more: privacy intimacy performativity
  • stop criminalizing migration. period.
    This morning I listened to The Daily’s Interview with a Border Control Agent, which gets at a topic I’ve been wanting to speak about for a while. I fundamentally don’t agree with this agent on the big topics. I don’t agree that “America should be first and all other countries second”. I don’t agree in “Legal Migration good, Illegal Migration bad”. I don’t even agree in fences around our homes. However I can understand the points that he is bringing in terms of the hypocrisy within America’s immigration “system.” Though it’s looking like there is some media coverage that is… Read more: stop criminalizing migration. period.
  • different kinds of poor.
    ta nehisi coates said in an interview on fresh air “different kinds of poor” and i think this is more relevant than ever. perhaps what is becoming less important is actually the idea popularized during OCCUPY of the 99% versus the top 1%. The 1% are fucking rich apparently, and don’t even know how to spend their money–but enough about them. Perhaps what’s more relevant now is what distinguishes and makes the rest of the 99% so different from each other. Different kinds of rich and poor. different kinds of precarity, different kinds of working. different kinds of choices around… Read more: different kinds of poor.
  • Agitated and Hysterical about the Climate Crisis
    Its true, I understand completely what Greta Thunberg means when she says that she fell into a depression after seeing that there is a CRISIS for thirty years at least and no one is “doing” anything about it, as she explained in a recent interview on Democracy Now! That everyone was saying “I care, I care” but no one was actually dropping everything and treating daily life like a disaster zone; except I suppose for people who were already literally or metaphorically putting out fires around them; their burning home, their flooded home, their home torn to pieces–Those who already… Read more: Agitated and Hysterical about the Climate Crisis
  • Why Is Refusing to Consume Framed as Sacrifice?
    I think that pretty much sums it up.