Imagine yourself not being male, not being white, not being cis-gender, not being heterosexual. Imagine yourself not being of the Western world, not having middle-class origins, nor a professional education that enables you a comfortable life and well-paid job, your house and a same-league, institutionally-recognized relation partnership. Imagine yourself being demographically elderly, and physically handicapped, or mentally disabled. Imagine having your body being too fat or too thin, too tall or too short, too hirsute or completely hairless. Do you identify with this picture, and how much of it makes you feel “Other”? Other, according to whom? Isn’t this “Other-ness” related to certain norms, on which contemporary powers are founded and institutionalized? And how does this certification work?

Nowadays, “Diversity” is stitched by a double binding. The nation-state classifies you as “Normal”, and then the neo-liberal market brands you “Exceptional”. More than simply “Emancipating” you as a subject, “Civil Rights” sew clothing of “Respectability” onto your social persona, manipulating you into “Marketability” on a worldwide scale. Half-folkloric puppet to be moved into its gay ghettos, half animal-on-a-leash with a pre-fabricated identity, your best friend is now the public opinion because “Gay” equals ‘sensitivity, art, entertainment, tolerance, and democracy,’ so long as you’re Western, White, Male, and paying your taxes.

The problem is that, for today’s capitalist raiders, the LGBT community is no longer tempting enough – it’s already been squashed like an orange and dried out in the sun. The mad men of marketing now re-frame you as “Exceptional” in your “Ex-Centricity”. They shall make you “Other”, “Individualistic”, a “Creative-Type”, a “Start-Upper”, “Queer-Positive”, “Lumbersexual”, “Face-Tattooed”, “Fat” and “Femme/-inist”, “Digitally Na(t)ive” but quite “Vintage”, half “Eco-Warrior”, a “Lesbian Summer Cyclist”, a “Tobacco Smoker” without additives on an addictive amphetamine rush, “Organic Enthusiast” and “Seasonal Vegan” while on MDMA, just so long as you remember to wear your funeral black every day. This is your new You, the “Other” other than your Self, in order to sell products to the environment you represent by emptying and privatizing your existence in contemporary metropolitan territories. Your “Otherness” is the tool with which the interests and the privileges of those managing the global economy is perpetrated. You are “Normal” by being the deviant.

In this context, GEGEN believes in laying traps for, ambushing, and laying siege to the arbitrary balancing of ideological norm versus deviance. Our goal is to produce continuously “Other” beings, escaping their own otherness in a nomadic process of future enlightenments that elude present branding. GEGEN wants to be your delightful garden of genetic waste, your car crash of identity dialectics, the broken mirror in which not recognizing your own image is the only way to find yourself. Subtract yourself by leaving a blank picture to the viewer. Don’t be cool. Stomp trends by producing them. Accelerate contradictions past the point of no return. Lose time by laughing. Dance through the generations. Get lost. Wear nervous energy. Make love to everyone, everywhere. Speak dead languages. Change your mind to the brink of schizophrenia. Be wrong. Push yourself where you don’t belong and tell your stories. Fall and let fall.
Betray yourself.
GEGEN OTHERS


Concept courtesy of Warbear
Grafic and video by Stefan Fähler

GEGENTANZ

LIQUID SKY (Filtered Visions- Sonus.fm)

WARBEAR (Gegen)

DR. RUBINSTEIN (Moments)

NINABELLE (Pritličje)

Visual: BOXIKUS (Gegen)


DRONE

ALEX PASTORE (Readymade)

O/H (live) (Opal Tapes)

A/ONA (Drone)

UNCTO (Furanum Rec) + SUKA OFF (live) (Video/Body Installation)

PHASE FATALE (Aufnahme + Wiedergabe)

Visual: NICOLAS SCHÄFFER (Ready Made)

₊

Free wardrobe, Free Fruits Buffets, Pool, Five Lounges, Fetish Balconades, An Undeground Hospital, Free other Shots for the first 100 comers and a paso doble for all creatures outside given schemes.

      Discordant Report