S.W.E.A.T.

This month's conversation is with performer Nancy Nutter. Nancy’s artistry expands through visual, performative, musical realms. She is one half of the piano cabaret duo THE DAMES, the lead vocalist of trans-femme punk band GIRLS IN YOUR AREA, and head of performance at TRACEY. She co-creates TREASON cabaret club night, and co-curates the performance stage at WHOLE FESTIVAL. Nancy teaches gender p...

This month's conversation is with performer and director Bishop Black Bishop Black is a black British performer, who has lived in Berlin since 2011. Bishop uses movement as a language and their body to expresses themselves primarily by using as a tool, politicized through the lenses of sexuality, gender and race. They have been performing in theater since 2017, and working as a performance and bur...

In this month's conversation, Mad Kate speaks with activist, musician and performer LIAD LAND. They speak about the layered realities of sex work and why the ProstSchG – Gesetz law in Germany pushed migrant sex workers further underground and out of reach of the peer networks that actually kept them safe. They talk about what community care really looks like when the system, and individuals, are e...

This month's conversation with punkrocker preacher drag performer activist and promoter BLEACH. Essex raised, Berlin Based Drag performer BLEACH is a central figure in the German capitals queer underground. Creating parties, shows & festivals. Starting out in a burlesque bar in Stockholm she entertains with a fiery mix of punking, stripping & speeching. A regular host of Berlin club nights, drag s...

My conversation this month is with queer and feminist cultural historian, educator, podcaster, and public speaker Ramzi Fawaz. https://www.ramzifawaz.com/ https://www.instagram.com/nerdfromthefuture/ Ramzi Fawaz is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and host of the podcast "Nerd from the Future". He is the author of two books, including The New Mutants: Superheroes and...

My conversation this month is with producer, musician, activist and creative technologist Sky Deep. Sky Deep is a Berlin-based live performer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer whose work fuses raw emotion, social consciousness, and technical mastery. Born in Los Angeles and shaped by the underground scenes of New York and Berlin, she merges electronic music, live instrumentation, and performanc...

My guest this month is transdisciplinary artist Isaiah Lopaz, whose work revolves around collage, photography, text, and performance. Born in occupied Tongvaland to a working class African American family, Lopaz is a descendent of Igbo / West African / Geechee / African American / First Nations peoples. His work frequently focuses on tracing where histories often framed as disparate and distinct,...

Fiorella Montero-Diaz is a Senior Lecturer in ethnomusicology at Keele University. She has a degree in Sound Engineering and Piano Performance from Peru, her country of birth. She later moved to the UK where she was awarded several international student excellence grants and graduated with distinction from Goldsmiths – University of London (MA in Ethnomusicology, 2008) and Royal Holloway – Univers...

In this month's "Spat Back At Ya" positionality conversation, Berlin legend Bleach has SPAT the questions back at host Mad Kate. Every couple of years, S.W.E.A.T. host Mad Kate likes to do a "positionality check-in" about where they are coming from and where they are at in their on-going research about the body in LABOUR. In this very special episode, in collaboration with BLEACH for her new Berli...

This month's conversation is with artist and healer Sārāh Mārtinus. Sārāh Mārtinus (she/they) is a research-informed artist and ancestral lineage healer. Her work focuses on relational kinship & contradiction (non dual, ritual) practice, decentralizing, deconditioning, and decolonizing through process-led co-emergence and intrapsychic ecologies. She writes, paints, and creates sound through centra...

This month's conversation is with erotic performer and activist Chiqui Love. Chiqui Love is a burlesque and striptease artist and storyteller with over 22 years of experience. A power femme and co-founding member of two strippers’ collectives—East London Strippers Collective and Berlin Strippers Collective—she works to de-stigmatize sex work and open a dialogue around more ethical ways of providin...

This months conversation is with Sami Rhymes, an International Award-Winning Spoken Word Artist, Poet and Author from London, UK. She also works in Project Management and as a Freelance Creative. Sami had her first poem published at the age of 9 in a young writers anthology. She released her debut collection 20 Something in 2020 and has contributed poems to other publications including It Will Be:...

This month's conversation with with transdisciplinary artist Liz Rosenfeld. Liz Rosenfeld is an NYC-born, Berlin-based transdisciplinary artist who works with film/video, performance, drawings and experimental writing practice. Liz addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, and past and future histories regarding the ways in which memory is queered....

This month’s conversation is with activist, writer, and engineer Ahmad Badawy. I met Ahmad at the protest encampment in front of the German parliament, where we were both calling attention to Germany’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In the middle of a bitter Berlin winter, Ahmad’s warmth and clarity stood out—his presence at the camp was not only political, but deeply personal, ground...

This month's edition of S.W.E.A.T. with Mad Kate features multidisciplinary artist Kim Ye. Kim Ye is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses performance, video, installation, text, and social engagement. Inserting herself into popular cultural forms, Ye interrogates gendered constructs shaping perceptions of power, labor, and taboo. Presenting bodies as both sites of domination and l...

This month's conversation is with writer and transdisciplinary artist Awadalla. Their work spans text, performance, and visual storytelling, reimagining how life and knowledge are shaped through queer and decolonial praxis. Alongside their creative practice, Awadalla works at the intersection of mental and sexual health as a practitioner and educator. They founded Decolonizing Sexual Health, an in...

This month’s guest on S.W.E.A.T. is Kaz Falkenstrom—a poet, drummer, and arts activist whose work has left a lasting impact on Tucson, Arizona’s literary and cultural landscape. Kaz has played a vital role in shaping the city’s arts scene, directing the Tucson Poetry Festival, co-founding Kore Press, and creating spaces for women’s voices in publishing. In 2002, she co-founded Odaiko Sonora, dedic...

Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, Olympia Bukkakis is a drag queen, choreographer, moderator, and writer living and working in Berlin. She is inspired by the tensions and intersections between queer nightlife and contemporary dance and performance. SWEAT is a series of conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual...

This months conversation is with Sudanese human rights activist and refugee rights activist Napuli Paul Langa. Napuli Paul Langa is a human rights activist who worked for the Sudanese Organization for Nonviolence and Development (SONAD), and is active in the Refugee Movement in Berlin, Germany, who have fought to maintain their place at Orianienplatz since 2013. We all sweat as we provide care, as...

This month's conversation is with Nadia Says (she/they), the co-founder of creative freelancer platform Your Mom's Agency and inclusivity advocacy network dif eV. Nadia is also an educator, journalist, and consultant in the fields of culture, music business, music tech, and DEI. Mostly based in Berlin, she has connections to the creative scenes of Beirut, Marseilles, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Disc...

This months conversation is with self-taught art-activist John Herman. John artistically explores themes of war and peace, visual sociology, and socio-political communication across a rich variety of media—from performances, to video installations, to photography—yet John Herman cryptically resists the title of “artist”. His practice is fed by his extreme experiences of war, when he was fighting a...

Diesen Monat sprechen wir mit dem Autodidakten und Kunstaktivisten John Herman. John Herman ist ein autodidaktischer Kunstaktivist, der sich nicht ausschließlich als Künstler begreift, auch wenn er Aktionskunst performt, Videoinstallationen erschafft und fotografiert. Darüber hinaus war er als Manager für Künstler im Bereich der Globalen Musik sowie als Kurator von Weltmusik-Formaten aus dem Mittl...

This months conversation is with author, activist and economic anthropologist Julio Linares Julio Linares is an economic anthropologist born in the territorios known today as Guatemala. In the last 13 years, he has been a migrant in Taiwan, the UK and Germany. Since 2018, he has served as Public Outreach for the Basic Income Earth Network. His first book “Decolonizing Money” (Pluto Press, 2025) ar...

This months conversation is with Dr. Shelley Wong, Professor Emeritus at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia in Multilingual/Multicultural Education. Her research interests include womanist, Critical Race and interfaith perspectives on justice, peace and reconciliation; dialogic inquiry, socio-cultural approaches to literacy, and critical multiculturalism. Dr. Wong is co-editor with Ilham...

This months conversation is with Demonia Yeguaza, an activist, performer, and dancer specializing in subversive, contemporary, and voguing dance. From a young age, Demonia’s path has been one of self-discovery and resilience. Through the transformative power of dance, she has navigated the complexities of identity and expression. Her artistic journey is marked by a deep commitment to understanding...