gegen touch

Skin on skin.
Teeth rubbing against other teeth.
Teeth biting fingernails.
Fingernails that pierce the palms of hands.
Your hands that close the eyelids of the person in front of you.
The back of your thigh crosses over the front of the other leg and the sweat that bonds everything together.
Which of your body parts would like to be touched?

Touch is a full body sensory immersion. It turns our skin into an emotional wardrobe, that becomes a medium for pressure, heat and pain – perhaps it's the rawest sense. A wild thing! That's why it's highly regulated. How near and far we are from each other is finely regulated and formalized by the parameters of our various relationships with kin, friends, colleagues, and strangers. The order in which we touch one another, where, and with what intensity is conditioned in particular by social norms of gender, place, and even time of day. We operate in a tactile regime or a regime of touch. What is too much and whats too little? Is it offensive or pleasurable to withhold touch or to perform it? Touch connects intimacy, pleasure and violence.

The body and its senses have for far too long been placed in opposition to the intellect and regarded as mere subejcts of mindless pleasure and pain. But touch transcends the separation of body and mind. It is the mind that controls a touch and that leads to an overload of the intellect through the affect of the touch. And it is also the most immediate technique to position ourselves in this world. Touch signifies the difference between the self and the other. It's about exploring the boundary and the relational fabric between bodies. We deploy touch in this way throughout our lives, to learn about other people and other objects. It is the precondition for "othering" but also the ultimate means to gain awareness of other non-normative bodies and embodiments.

And it is all happening on the dance floor. Here it is the fat bass and melodic fragments that try to touch us. They challenge us to be touched and to touch ourselves at the same time. We move to touch and we touch to move.
At GEGEN, touch is not received, it is enacted.

concept courtesy of Mirko Winkel
photo courtesy of Florian Hetz
graphics & logo by Enrico Bardin