The Body That Moves
Performance & Lecture Program

Platform 82 | Goethestraße 82, 10623 Berlin

06.06.2024, 20h
lecture performance
Lauryn Youden
you're seeping into my bloodstream

You’re seeping into my bloodstream is a 1.5 hr poetry reading, performative lecture and auto-theoretical essay on love ruled by disease, examining its sick and vampiric tendencies for subsistence. This performance delves into Lauryn Youden’s continued exploration of chronic illness as near-death experience, or a “time of ‘non-death’”. As a term coined by Gruppo Di Nun in Revolutionary Demonology, “time of ‘non-death’ speaks of the mysterious presence of absence, a world populated by impersonal forces and entities, that although not alive, cannot be called dead”.  For Youden, the term becomes inextricably intertwined with the canon of lesbian vampire literature and its metaphors for disability, disease and queer Crip lust. In this realm of the undead, the terrifying angels of Rainer Maria Rilke co-exist with tragic heroines from meta-fictional K-dramas, relive 2015 psycho-thriller bimbo comedies, and sit through many a BPD girl dinner. Interwoven with Youden’s personal accounts of illness, limerence and immortal deviance, she threads together cross-generational fact and fiction, relating to forms of Crip collectivity and its underworld networks of care.

Lauryn Youden is a Canadian poet, performance and installation artist. Her practice derives from her research and navigation through the medical industrial complex / colonial medicine, 'alternative' healing practices and traditional
medicine for the treatment of her chronic illnesses and disabilities. By publicly presenting her personal experiences and queer crip reevalutions of history, her work illuminates and advocates for repressed, marginalized and forgotten
forms of radical care and crip knowledge.

Youden was awarded the Berlin Art Prize (2016) and is founder and co-director of Ashley Berlin, and member of Sickness Affinity Group (SAG).

Program by: Marjolein van der Meer & Nazlı Yayla

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