General Humanity Lab 6: PanEros

WHO THE F* NEEDS PENISES?

A PERFORMATIVE RESEARCH BY GENERAL HUMANITY

First presentation June 2023, TONALi Saal, Hamburg in collaboration with blurred edges festival and TONALI (Hamburg), Gallery Sextante (Bogotá) and entre-rios.net (UK 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 variability of desire: Eros redefined as an all-encompassing, ambiental eroticism.

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 climbing and chanting in the trees during twilight… The voices at times drown in 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, an international collective for theory-performance based in Hamburg. The premiere at TONALi SAAL with support by TONALi was part of the blurred edges festival funded by the Hamburg Ministry for Culture and the Media and the Hambuger Kulturstiftung.