Lesbians are touching mohair berets

2019/2020/2022

Premiere: Curie City, Warsaw, 12.09.2020.

Preview: London Contemporary Dance School, London, February 2019

Performed at: Transforme! Queer Art Festival, Marseille, May 2022, Outburst Queer Art Festival, Belfast, November 2022.

Video performance: Material Fatigue — the National Exhibition of Polish Tapestry, presented as part of the 17th International Triennial of Tapestry, Central Museum of Textiles, Łódź, October 8th, 2022 – April 15th, 2023.

How can fabrics be intertwined with ideologies and ways of thinking? Alka Nauman’s research began with the discovery that Filippo Tommaso Marinetti — founder of Futurism and active supporter of Italian fascism — harboured an obsession with touching sensual fabrics. This unlikely connection between fascism and soft, tactile materials led her to recall the mohair beret, a garment in Poland commonly associated with elderly women who identify with the Catholic far right.

Fluffy, delicate, lukewarm, humorous, soft, sensual — in many ways, the mohair beret is also profoundly queer. It embodies a paradoxical mixture of domesticity, ambiguity, and violence. Lesbians Are Touching Mohair Berets is a short performance in which Nauman reclaims the beret through an anti-fascist, erotic gesture, using it as a lens to speak about her experience of living as a lesbian woman in Poland.

In 2022, Alka was invited by curator Jakub Gawkowski to create a video adaptation of her performance of the same title for Material Fatigue — the National Exhibition of Polish Tapestry, presented as part of the 17th International Triennial of Tapestry in Łódź.

In the work, sensual touch intertwines with erotic and anti-fascist poetry written by Nauman, inspired by queer Polish zines of the 1980s and 1990s, discovered in the archives of Lambda Warszawa — the oldest Polish LGBTQIA+ organisation. This intimate textual layer is set against a soundscape referencing the sonic aesthetics of the Polish far right, generating a charged interplay of desire, resistance, and cultural memory.

CREDITS:

Concept, choreography, performance, video, Sound, Text: Alka Nauman 

Extracts from videos of: Thomas Rafa, Michal Szymanderski-Pastryl, Uwaga Babcia Gotuje, Alka Nauman

Sound extracts from: 8th of August queer solidarity protest with Margo known as the rainbow night, holy mass led by a far-rigt priest father rydzyk, protests organized by a Polish far-right organization ONR.

photos: camilla Greenwell, Jakub Szafrański, Alka Nauman

photos from  research and preview performance:

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