S.W.E.A.T‪.‬ Mad Kate

This months conversation is with Fariya Mohiuddin. Fariya is the Senior Program Officer, Tax and Policy (Global) at the International Budget Partnership. Since joining IBP in 2019, she has been leading the Tax Equity initiative’s regional and global work as well as providing strategic support to the Tax Equity’s in-country work across Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. Prior to joining IBP, Fariya was the Strategic Programs Researcher at the Tax Justice Network where she her focus was on developing a human rights, feminist, and gender equality focused network of tax activists and researchers as well as research on the link between human rights and tax justice. In this role, she was an inaugural steering committee member of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice’s Global Tax and Gender Working Group and helped lead the creation of its first strategy framework; she was also the main organizer behind the Global Convening on Women’s Rights and Tax Justice in Bogota in 2017. Fariya has also worked with the International Centre for Tax and Development, the World Bank Group, the Ford Foundation, and Open Society Foundation on research projects on the political economy of accountability, citizen engagement and transparency in relation to taxation. She holds both a Bachelor’s of Arts (Economic and International Relations) and a Master’s of Global Affairs from the University of Toronto.

This months conversation is with the The Incredible Edible Akynos. The Incredible, Edible, Akynos (MF Akynos, for short) is a international burlesque performer and curator. A show-stopping entertainer who has curated, headlined, and performed in productions from New York to Europe, she is also a sex worker activist and has been performing burlesque since 2007. Akynos is the founder of the Black Sex Worker Collective, author, performance artist, and an educator in the fields of sexuality, HIV, and human rights. She has advised other non-profit organizations including Desiree Alliance, where she has spearheaded the arts track for the national conference, and the Best Practices Policy Project, where she works on UN Policy relating to women at the Commission on the Status of Women and during the Universal Periodic Review of the human rights record of the United States at the Human Rights Council. Her writings may also be found at Blackheaux.wordpress.com.

Akynos describes herself thus:

My official stage names are The Incredible, Edible, Akynos, Or MFA (MothaFuckin’ Akynos) It’s pronounced (Ah-Key-Nos). My tagline: “The Beast Of Burlesque” was given to me by performer friend Voodoo Onyx. I’m a New York raised stripper. Featured in nude magazines, music videos and adult websites since I was 17. I’m a MILF supreme, nappy hair having, 45” of ass, performance artist. You can find me taking it off in burlesque showcases across the globe but primarily on NYC stages. I’ve featured/headlined in showcases both locally and internationally. In 2009 I was the winner of the best soloist and judge’s choice award at the Boston Burlesque Expo. In the same year I was runner up for the Miss International Showgirl competition in Jamaica; (one day I will compete again). I’ve curated shows in my homeland of Jamaica at the infamous Hedonism II resort, NYC, Vegas, and DC. My last projects were Darkie, THICK and Dark. Nude. Storytellers. My new one-woman show “Black Pussy”, the scripted web series “Chronicles Of A Black Heaux”, and the social/whore commentary web-series “Whore Logic”, (currently on YouTube), all of which need your support and attention.

A leadership and program developer/organizer I am also a member of several different sex worker ran/lead organizations where I’ve lobbied in New York State against Condoms As Evidence and helped make recommendations on human rights policies at The UN. Some of these wonderful organizations which I hope you will support are: The Desiree Alliance, The Sex Worker Film & Arts Festival, Best Practices Policy Project, SWOP-NYC, We Are Dancers and The NJ Red Umbrella Alliance; because being a ho should be every woman’s [person’s] fundamental right. And sex work is work. Don’t debate me on that. I’ll tear you down.

I was a dance major in high school and had a short theater acting stint until I decided to take a long break to raise my children and deal with patriachy. I’ve performed in, competed and won many talent competitions since I was 12. These days I’m a borough famous emerging artist who holds two college degrees, working as a massage therapist and maid because something has to support my artistic habit. All the while I’m wagging my duster at you, screaming for the rights of every human to use their body and energy how they choose. Walk with me. -A

https://akynos.com/about/

S.W.E.A.T. features conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual/ized body at work—work as labour of survival and labour of a/Art with host Mad Kate. This month's conversation is with editor and curator María Inés Plaza Lazo.

María Inés Plaza Lazo founded in 2018, together with Paul Sochacki, the multilingual streetnewspaper for art and society, wealth and poverty called Arts of the Working Class. Since then, she writes for the paper and allied publications, edits pieces individually and collectively, sells advertisement spots according to each issue's topics and interests, talks constantly with vendors, contributors and potential collaborators, curates exhibitions related to the overarching concerns shared in AWC, gives lectures in different universities and academies such as The New Centre, brings stacks of AWC to different cities such as LA, New York, Quito or Barcelona, and takes care of the project and the people around it as a publisher. She currently lives in and works from Düsseldorf, preferably in trains.

We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we f**k, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.

You can find out more https://www.alfabus.us/s-w-e-a-t/

Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, sound designer, performance artist and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004, expanding their unique identity-queering, genderfcking and sexpositive performative work throughout music, theatre and film. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world.

Tracks Played:

Mad Kate - My Fear of Pretending (featuring Lori Baldwin)

A few things mentioned:

https://artsoftheworkingclass.org/about
https://www.instagram.com/arts_of_the_working_class/
https://www.neueauftraggeber.de/en/
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/562184/art-workers-summit/

Cover Photo: Sabine Vielmo, 2022, Courtesy of The New Institute in Hamburg

This month's conversation is with artist and activist Cassie Thornton. Cassie makes a safer space for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). Her 2020 book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is available from Pluto Press.

Cassie's website: https://feministeconomicsdepartment.com/

We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we f**k, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.

S.W.E.A.T. podcast website: https://www.alfabus.us/sweat-podcast/

Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, sound designer, performance artist and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004, expanding their unique identity-queering, genderfcking and sexpositive performative work throughout music, theatre and film. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world.

support S.W.E.A.T.

In this new season of S.W.E.A.T. we will dive more deeply into questions around how we organize, vision and dream new strategies for work care and survival.

Starting off is a very fresh conversation with two artists and activists Jara Nassar and Joshua Schwebel, recorded on the 7th of January, just one day before a demonstration in front of Berlin's Abgeordnetenhaus, where inside was being discussed the adoption of the IHRA WDA as a prerequisite for the reception of cultural funding from the Senat. Jara and Joshua work in the collective Arts and Cultural Alliance Berlin, who organized the demonstration because the IHRA WDA has notoriously been utilized to silence and cancel pro-Palestinian voices in the arts.

Jara Nassar is a German-Lebanese-US-American writer, performer and anthropologist interested in boundaries and blurring them. She writes poetry, plays, and prose in German and English, interwoven with Levantine Arabic. Her writing haa been published in NEVER WAKE Anthology, Tangle and Fen, and Glitter. She is also the host of the annual memorial to Sarah Hegazi. As Drag King Angelo Dynamo he hosts the show Border Ctrl. You can follow her work on Instagram under the handle @jaramachtsachen and on her blog dasreisekind.wordpress.com.

https://www.instagram.com/jaramachtsachen/ https://www.instagram.com/angelodynamo/ https://www.instagram.com/border_ctrl_show/

Joshua Schwebel is a Canadian conceptual artist based in Montreal and Berlin. Working in conceptual art and institutional critique, Schwebel has presented his work internationally and across Canada. He has held residencies in Paris, Berlin, Beijing, Gdansk, Krakow, Marseille, and Perth, Western Australia. He holds an MFA from NSCAD University (2008), and a BFA from Concordia University (2006). Schwebel’s work has been supported by both the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Joshua Schwebel's artistic practice responds to sites and situations, looking at the neoliberal infrastructures that precondition the exhibition and valorization of art. Schwebel is interested in the art exhibition complex as a productive, material, politically and financially situated context. His work augments the already-ongoing institutional performances that correlate contemporary art and capitalism.

In examining the framing of art as a construct that both confers and protects value, his work reflects what we expect art to be and how these expectations veil systemic problems plaguing contemporary art including the intensely hierarchized and stratified work culture in art institutions; the instrumentalization of artists and art institutions in the gentrification of neighbourhoods; and the effects of austerity politics on cultural funding, which have effectively entrenched institutional dependence on donors and established the already-wealthy as the arbiters of taste and legitimacy in art.

https://joshuaschwebel.com/home.html

https://linktr.ee/arts_culture_alliance_berlin

This month's episode is with DJ and producer TMSKDJ. The masked DJ (TMSKDJ) born Micheel Nana Adwoa Agyakomah Yeboah is an electronic and African Dance Music DJ and producer based in Accra, Ghana. TMSKD pronounced as THE MASKED is one of the few disc jockeys in Ghana breaking the status quo of Djing with her versatile skill set of introducing and fusing alternative sounds to the Accra music scene often electronic and African Dance genres into her live performances.

As a young and gifted DJ, mostly conservative reflecting a persona of an introvert, she uniquely came up with the masked concept in 2015 to highlight her craft as a DJ albeit the curiousness of most audiences to focus on her gender as a female rather than her eminent craft.

Rising from a campus room party DJ in 2013 to one of the few DJs spearheading an alternative touch to the African music scene, TMSKDJ keeps showing an improved skill set when it comes to the turntables.

TMSKD created the Eargasm EDM show and is part of the alternative pool of DJs led by DJ Benjamin Le Brave of Akwaaba Music.

https://www.instagram.com/tmskdj/?hl=en

https://soundcloud.com/platform/tmskdj-boiler-room-accra-oroko

https://linktr.ee/tmskdj

Tracks Played:
My Fear of Pretending - Mad Kate featuring the voice of Lori Baldwin

Cover Photograph: Hakeem&Six