«The nose is always at fault»

Smell is also memory. Smell as memory and smell as physicality both invoke practices of agency. A stench is a stench. The stench is limiting bodies to “either-or”. Multimodalities of self-fashioning are the order; unimagined selfhood is the prayer. Non-linear, inexplicable, discontinuing, undefined and in-between is the stench. The queer stench begins to reshape the chemistry of social fabric, perturbating the heteronormative temporalities in prevailing colonial narratives. Society is maintained by cultural promises such as language and symbols, which keep us bound to a particular way of perceiving the world. Smell, unlike other signifiers, is not easily chained to fixed meanings. Smell exudes out of these cultural promises and reaches beyond the invisible net that covers our eyes and our ears. Can we smell the future? Can we smell something yet to come, caught in the in-between?

In this iteration, the digital soirées queerators are responding to their own call, reaching into their performance practices and herstories of being the stinch.

About the queerators team:

Tandile Mbatsha
Cape Town, SA

Tandile Mbatsha (They/ Them and Theirs) is a South African queer and gender non-binary performance artist, choreographic-activist, educator, speaker, host, producer, model and scholar. They make multimodal performance work that illuminates imigudu of racialised queer people to self-fashion and self-determine. Tandile makes work that emphatically declares the full humanness and citizenship of queer people.

Isu Mignon Mignonne
Seoul KR/ Berlin DE

Isu Mignon Mignonne 異水 美龍 未姩 is club-kid persona of Isu : Mignonne here doesn’t stand for “cute” in French, but for 미친년 Mi-Chin-Nyeon in Korean, which means “crazy b*tch”. Isu creates performances that are a fluid mixture of drag, lecture, movements, spoken words and more. In its performances, Isu often questions the notion and boundary of "human-ness".

Cat Jugravu
Berlin DE/ Salzburg AT

Cat Jugravu is trans non-binary performance artist, poet and theatre director of Roma descent.
They are currently finishing their MA in Applied Theatre: Artistic Practice and Society at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. Their current interest is centred around the intersection of performance, deep bodywork in thepolitics of trauma and social activism, with a particular focus on queer life. Since 2015 they have been living in Berlin, Germany focusing on generating creative work in response to the needs and rights of LGBTQIA* communities under the firm belief that through/with/for the queer body, new sociocultural methods of negotiation and practices will surface. Based on this belief they founded the Queerdos Kollektiv in 2018, alongside which they are presently honing their skills as artistic director and facilitator.