infinity kiss at Bärenzwinger Community Gallery, Berlin 2023

by Layton Lachman

Created in consortium with:

Arta de Mi, Camila Malenchini, Caroline Neill Alexander, Dan Immanuel Roth, Ethan Allison Folk, Kalil Bat, Nagi Gianni, Samuel Hertz, & wro wrzesińska.

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infinity kiss conjures a complex, wild, and unexpected series of encounters. We dance the dance of the parasite, the symbiote, the self-devouring ones, the ancient clonally multiplying ones. Within a dense sonic and visual landscape, a network of bodies converge–aroused and excited–playing between individuality and the materiality of our interconnectedness. We spawn and respawn again, exhausted by the drive to replicate and yet bristling at the touch of another. We propose new stories of horizontal genetic exchange and long-lasting intimacy between strangers. Follow us into an inter-species celebration, a queer cruise: a primordial, biological ooze which inevitably merges with everything it touches.

“Symbiotic interaction is the stuff of life on a crowded planet. Our symbiogenetic composite core is far older than the recent innovation we call the individual human. Our strong sense of difference from any other life-form, our sense of species superiority, is a delusion of grandeur.” -Lynn Margulis

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Arta de Mi, heteronym of Dani Paiva de Miranda (also known as Mundo), is a performer and experimental artist. His work crosses diverse media and ecologies, exploring the transfiguring power of experience. Nowadays her objective is to synthesize the digital and the organic into formless matter. Arta de Mi investigates the horizontal relationship between matter and energy, denying the separation of matter into form and refraining from a linear sequence of time. This practice leads to questions about the dynamics of power and violence, challenging conventional notions. Employing light design, light installation, performance art (actions and happenings), sound and choreography, they channel an emotional and sensory experience. Website: https://www.cuntscollective.com/dpmiranda

Camila Malenchini is an Argentinian choreographer and artist based in Berlin. Her artistic practice crosses diverse media; from choreography and sculpture to digital media and curating. Her work begins with the body and questions the potentiality of imagination. She completed her studies in Choreography at HZT. Her work has been presented at HAU, DOCK 11, Centro Cultural Konex, Arqueologias del Futuro among others. She’s currently working in collaboration with artists Marga Alfeiráo, Layton Lachman and the T.E.N.T. collective.

Caroline Neill Alexander received her BA degree in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. For the past six years she has been living and working in Berlin, developing her own work as well as collaborating with other Berlin choreographers and T.E.N.T. Collective. In her own work, she deals with the space between person and persona and the blurred reality of reality. Caroline’s aesthetic is physical, horrific, comedic, beautiful and grotesque and always incorporating voice and text. These ideas were explored in her latest solo works Fear & Fantasy, The Oasis, Full Moonay, and Sharterlla: House of Desperation.

Dan Immanuel Roth is a vocalist and performer based in Berlin and Southern Germany. He studied stage and costume design at the TU Berlin and combines performing arts and visual arts. He uses dance and movement to understand space and is dedicated to creating scenic utopias of space and society. Dan Immanuel is a countertenor and uses classical arias for a critical illumination of the individualistic consumer society. He works in the context of stage, exhibitions, clubculture, video and photography.

Ethan Allison Folk is a Berlin-based director, cinematographer, and 3D animator whose work orbits intimacy and the absurd. Ethan co-founded Buttermilk Films in 2016 as a platform for work in the genre of "New Queer Cuisine".

Born in France, with an Afro-Creole background, Kalil Bat is a freelance dancer and performer currently based in Berlin. Kalil has been training in Contemporary dance and pole-dancing for many years, as well as contortion and acrobatics. He is currently enrolled in a full-time dance education while still pursuing his artistic career and enriching his movement vocabulary through various projects in Berlin and Europe.

Nagi Gianni is a Swiss multidisciplinary artist. He develops a plastic language centered on the body as a means of transforming itself to probe other possibilities, to explore other bodies through its metamorphoses. In his performances, costumes and masks, gestures and movements are intended to convey to the audience the inner tension towards a multiplicity of existences, in opposition to the idea of a closed, unchanging identity. Through the mask he creates he questions the relationship to the identification of the self in the digital age, and develops in parallel a oneiric imaginary where the animal, the cyborg, the mythological and the ghostly converge. These figures of the uncanny are for him a means of opening up other relationships to the perception of reality through an approach that questions and displaces what is already known and clearly identifiable.

Samuel Hertz is a sound-artist/researcher working with sound-sensing networks of environmental and climate science research. His work explores a material approach to sound that amplifies new ways of hearing the complex violences of climate and environmental change wrought by extractive practices. His artistic research has been exhibited and performed in locations such as the Ars Electronica Festival (AT), Palais de Tokyo (FR), Akademie der Künste (DE), Pioneer Works (US), Fylkingen (SE), Opera North (UK), IMAX theaters, as well as deep ocean light installations, lunar radio transmissions, and aboard the International Space Station among others. www.samhertzsound.com