General Humanity Lab 6: PanEros

WHO THE F* NEEDS PENISES?

A PERFORMATIVE RESEARCH BY GENERAL HUMANITY

First presentation 16 June 2023 @ TONALi, Hamburg in collaboration with blurred edges 2023 festival, Sextante Galería (Bogotá) and entre-rios.net (University of Essex)

Panerotic Manifesto English version here; Spanish version here

PanEros. 4-channel audio installation; stereo version published on General Humanity Musicking

Watch the trailer here

PanEros ~ Who the f* needs penises? is sharpening the politics and aesthetics of sexual diversity and desire: it is an ode to phallomania, abuse, and humiliation in human sexuality, and a call for an ambiental erotics grounded in a feminist aesthetics: Life awash with Eros / Life awash with Life.

Four women proclaim, recite, sigh a Panerotic Manifesto; each voice carrying its unique timbre, life experience, cultural grounding; recorded in the Reserva Rio Guachaca in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia they are combined with durational audio recordings: the humming of insects and chanting of birds at midnight during a full moon, male apes chanting in the trees during twilight… At times, the human voices are drowned out by the natural soundscape, then reemerge.

This immersive audio-installation is followed by a lecture performance for two performers or one solo performer and voluntary readers, combined with a double screen video projection. The performance gives a multiperspectival, queerfeminist account of the discontents of sexuality: phallomania which not only governs conventional sexual practices and imaginaries but also non-standard ones such as gay, BDSM and Kinky: more erection, more penetration, more cum!

The performance shifts between lecture, autoethnography, ironic slogan, and a lyrical call for an ambiental eroticism rooted in female sexuality. On a larger than life double video screen behind the performers appear a river, female bodies, menstruation blood, stones, sand, algae, mud transacting with each other; as well as images recorded during a public breakdance rehearsal in Sao Paulo: all carrying sexual energies in their broad, panerotic sense: Life awash with Eros / Life awash with Life.

PanEros is an outcome of the research project PAN/SEX funded by the Fonds Darstellende Künste/NEUSTART KULTUR and was initiated during a collaborative residency by Galería Sextante (Bogotá) in January 2023. Following up on FUTURE EVE / EARTH PULSE (2022) PanEros is the sixth Lab of General Humanity, a project of transspecies aesthetics founded by Ingrid Hoelzl 2018 in Budapest and based in Hamburg since 2020. The premiere at TONALi was co-produced by TONALi and part of the blurred edges festival funded by the Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media and the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung.