Do not expect in this art event to hear «words of confession» – this is not a confessional. You will also look in vain for a spectacle. Rather, look at the exhibition «like an Art Party where everyone's invited.» Indeed, we propose an charming metaphorical journey through the melancholic spaces of your own troubles. Get rid of the tension! Follow the principles of pleasure alone, just and only your own desires! Think about it! It is entirely within your reach. We all have means of moving on. We are all nomads, migrate without end. Our identity is in constant movement, incessant transformation – the metamorphoses of time. Indeed this is the only thing we know for sure. Step by step some crawl, others jump, from moment to moment, day after day, up and down, left and right, walking, making use of various devices, their own feet, a bicycle, motorcycle, car, plane, horse, prostheses. Find your own path, change perspectives, and you'll find unknown views. Speed is not important, nor is the distance covered! Some will get to the corner of the neighboring street, where they can find displacement, appropriating the technologies of disappearance, a gender fading away, transformation, gender–as–neither. « 'The wind!' he cried.» (Virginia Woolf, Orlando) The wind is that which forms the trunks of the trees and makes them rounded. It plays with the sands and molds the dunes, which in the next moment fortuitously disperse without conquest, ownership, colonizing, and chaotically reshape from one wave to the next. We live in a world in fusion, under the heat of the sun, seeking its shape. Consider the attractiveness of «being seen without make–up» (Claude Cahun), the bliss of being 'your real self', make sense of yourself in an 'adorable world' of manifold realities. timeless. Take a deep breath! Breathe! And no fear whatsoever! If you make a mistake, if you slip, or your plane makes a forced landing, the best recipe for survival is: «Don't be alarmed!» The snake will not strike its poisonous fangs into you. Only morality may urge you to hate yourself. «Do not believe in a right and a wrong way of thinking!» Some may be tempted to call this journey an Odyssey. Let us call it an inverted Odyssey.

The protagonist can be any one of us. Their name varies, because there is no main protagonist, but rather a multitude of characters. There is not one narrative – there are lots of them, which multiply, elastically stretch, convolute, interweave. History is full of combinations, floors, entrances and exits, beginnings and ends. A hullabaloo of voices speaking in different timbres, registers and flows, from different perspectives. Take a walk in this green area of yourself. Memory is fragmented, not linearly contructed, past, future, present blend in all shades. How do you bear living in binaries?

Claude Cahun proposes to mix it all up. In Hans Scheirl's words: «Another word–game I play is with s/hit: she+he+its/hit!»

In the German and English languages gender happens, as in many other languages, when you are speaking of or attempting to describe the other. The Other. Slow down to appreciate once again, there, the effect of the mirror, your own face! The mirror that renders your own traits, which stiffen you with horror. Otherness. «A new verb, a new object and same subject. Always the same chain of complaints.» (Claude Cahun)

«These selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiters hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine – and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him–and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.» – Virginia Woolf, Orlando

We want to overcome the limitations in the structure of language and our cognitive sensitivity, to widen our perception beyond a bio–polar system and a cultural world declined in binaries, which produces hierarchies and opposites, by seeking dynamic links of unrelenting communication and a metamorphosis of the transmission of relations. Because gender is one of the zones we know well from inside and outside. A place where these binary notions most critically cross, and where they are most unstable. This can be viewed in the tension between private and public, visible and invisible, where repression is produced. Against this, we use political disruption, public and private, relying on self–reflective strategies and charming tactics of resistance, against the fetishism of a collective in need of control – a politics of chaos, the queer movement.

«The «green» in the title of the event is a reference to Walt Whitmans «Leaves of Grass», in which he compares people to leaves of grass, growing in all sorts of directions, each leaf entirely different in the general green space, directed towards the sun, shaking in the wind and soaked in the rain. There is no formula, no two genders, just a space without privilege and hierarchy and dominating.»

Dimitrina Sevova

The Lavender Song – Ute Lemper