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Lesung & Performance mit Ioana Cristina Casapu, Ambika Thompson, Shlomit Lasky, Ruby Russell, ”Mire”, Sivia Laporta, Lili Khoury & Dana Berghes

How compelling must a woman be to meet society's expectations? Feminine, vulnerable, but also strong, skilled in a variety of tasks, able to manage both housework, freedom, friendship, family and career. Able to fix a washing machine, have negotiation skills, manage the emotional labor in a couple and at the same time accumulate wealth. Remember to defend her territory when necessary, be attractive and take care of her appearance. Don’t complain too much, smile more, be fully available while self-caring, and maintain an aura of mystery while enduring pain. Be leftist, powerful and determined while being demure. All these aspects seem incompatible, like the contrast between a lioness and a lily, between a motherly saint and a witch. The ripples of this contrast still spread far and wide. And are not sustainable.
In art, this contrast is perhaps most visibly represented. Cinema, literature, music, performance, as mirrors of society, have often been challenged for their stereotypical portrayal of women characters, often limiting them to superficial roles and to their physical appearance, instead of their ever-evolving, transformative, and perhaps uncomfortable bodies of work.

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Girl, Show Me That Body (of Work) is an event series exclusively showcasing womxn writers, poets, and performers from migration backgrounds, illuminating the transgenerational trauma borne by lineage, politics, and society, and the work womxn artists do to heal it.
Created by author and journalist, Ioana Cristina Casapu, the first event serves as a bridge through the shortest night of 2024, when nature's forces peak.
We will show six performances by womxn artists gathering on the brightest day of the year to move us together through the darkness. On June 21, the sun sets at around 10 p.m. This is the brightest, longest day of the year, and the shortest, yet, deepest, darkest night. As we gather, we set the night on fire. We invite you to take in the light and shadow from these stories into your next half of the year. We bring you poetry, prose, performance, and song in ritualistic celebration, honoring womxn's resilience against historical perils. Join us in experiencing bodies of work that challenge parsimony and forward progressiveness, illuminating our dance and passing through this night.
We are pleased to present a LINEUP of six performances by international womxn artists connected to Berlin, showcasing works of poetry, prose, performances and music, written and interpreted in English for this edition.

Disclaimer: Some of the artistic contributions may contain mentions of sex, assault or violence.

The event will be mostly hold in English.

Lili Khoury (she/her) is a Palestinian/German poet and feminist activist based in Berlin. She believes in the power of poetry to transform communities to become more just and loving. Next to her poetry, she sometimes writes her own songs and is working for an NGO in the field of development and humanitarian work.

Dana Berghes (she/her) is a Romanian writer, content designer, and music industry consultant. Dana transited Bucharest, Berlin, Hamburg, and Brussels, exploring topics such as identity, trauma and memory, migration and conflict, as well as music and community building. Her work includes translations, short stories, personal essays, poems, reviews, and interviews. Between 2011 and 2017, Dana ran a music column in an online urban culture magazine. In 2018, her work received the Press Prize awarded by the National Centre for Contemporary Dance in Bucharest for an interview with Mexican artist Christina Maldonado. One year later, Dana coordinated qualitative research for and co-authored a Romanian essay collection on the grammar of attraction, discourses on sexuality, and the politics of sex (Don’t Bite Your Tongue, 2020). In 2023 she published her first photo essay with the German print mag ”Acts of: Affection”.

Ambika Thompson (they/them) has been published in Electric Literature, Riddle Fence, Crab Fat Magazine, Fanzine, Joyland, The Fiddlehead and PANK. They have an MFA in creative writing from Guelph University, are a fiction editor at Berlin’s SAND journal, and are one-half of the Riot Grrrl cello duo Razor Cunts➚.

Shlomit Lasky➚ (she/her) has been a relationship columnist for ‘Laisha,’ Israel’s leading women’s magazine since 2006. Originally from Tel Aviv, Berlin has been her home since 2010. Alongside writing, she guides tours in Berlin and works as a voice-over artist for the German public news broadcaster, Deutsche Welle (DW). Currently, Shlomit has an original series in development with UFA. She has received grants from the Israeli Film Fund and the German National Film Fund (FFA) to develop original screenplays that were later optioned. Her short play, ‘The Imaginary Ex’, was selected for Zavta’s Short Plays Festival (2011). She was awarded a grant from the Zurückgeben Foundation (Berlin, 2020) to develop her debut novel. Shlomit has an acting diploma from Beit-Zvi Academy of Performing Arts (Israel) and a master's in screenwriting from the University of the Arts, London (LCC).

Ruby Russell➚ (she/her) is a writer and editor, originally from London, living in Berlin. For more than a decade, her journalistic work has focused on the ecological crisis and the ideas that shape our responses to it. Her first book, Doing It All: The Social Power of Single Motherhood was published in 2024 by Dialogue Books in the UK and Seal Press in the US.

”Mire”➚ is the dark-ambient drone and atmospheric soundscape project of Andreea Hriscu (she/her), a visual, performance, and sound Berlin-based artist. With a background in architecture, she opened her first solo painting exhibition in 2016 at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Beijing, China, and her first live painting performance in 2018 in Beijing, followed by other performances in Bangkok and Berlin. Her photography and painting are mostly abstract, her sound projects consist of dark ambient soundscapes, and her painting performances are dark, emotional, and viscerally intense. They explore and embody different aspects of the psyche: the subconscious, the hidden aspects of the self, and the unfelt raw emotions. Within this embodiment, she becomes fully immersed in the artistic process, blurring the boundaries between the self, the process, and the object.

Sivia Laporta➚ (she/her) is an Italian, Berlin-based holistic body worker, and a gong and soundscapes performer. Her work sheds light on the intriguing connection between sounds, cognitive experiences and the subtle energies that shape our state of mind. Silvia’s sound landscapes journey to a wide spectrum of oneiric experimental waves of sounds produced by therapeutic & shamanic instruments as Tibetan bowls, gong, ocean drums, koshis, chimes, bells & voice. By inducing a deep meditative state, this ‘psychedelic like’ experience evokes multidimensional aspect of subconscious, and beyond, a travel through time and space to meet the self. Silvia offers 1:1 treatments, group sessions & art performances in Berlin and in Europe.

Ioana Cristina Casapu➚ (she/her/they/them) is a Romanian-born author of novels, essays, and poetry, with contributions to over 30 anthologies and magazines in English, German, and Romanian. Community, a central element of womxn's lives, forms the core of her research. Her writing projects for the Goethe-Institut and the Romanian cultural newspaper DILEMA document the lives of Romanian women artists in Germany and the war experiences of women who fled to Germany from Ukraine and Israel. Through her continued writing and projects, she strives to honor the efforts of women who have fled traumatizing circumstances to live a safer life; to find rooms of their own in the world, a community that, in the words of Emily Dickinson, illuminates-and does not seal their experiences.