SIEGMAR ZACHARIAS is a performance artist and researcher. Her works produce situations of embodied visceral thinking together with and through matter. They develop formats of performances, immersive installations, discursive encounters and curations that deal with questions of the generative ethical dynamics of transformation: agency, liquefaction, ecologies of artistic and social practice. Learning from uncontrollable material like smoke, slime, drool, nervous system and death and dying, she collaborates with humans and non-humans. Exploring the politics of intimacy & alienation toward a queer feminist post-humus poet(h)ics.
Recent work includes: Training for Political Imaginaries (a series of durational immersive symposia with artists, activists, theorists); Re_Generation – Practicing Futures while grieving (a multi-sensory immersive listening installation); WAVES – listening towards social bodies (series of online somacoustic listening sessions during lockdown 2020); Drooling Lecture (a series of performance lectures in which fluid mindsets work in collaboration with slime, saliva and a voice to be explored); Slimedynamics; The Cloud: a cosmo-choreography made by animals / vegetables / minerals / humans / concepts / emotions; Dirty thinking; invasive hospitality. They have been presented nationally and internationally in theatres, festivals, conferences, galleries, green houses, the woods, and up in the sky.
Her artistic research and practice collides approaches from old and new knowledges and practices, science and para-science towards co-habitation with the uncontrollable. She is a certified death doula acknowledging the necessity to develop collective and public forms of grieving. With Neha Chriss and Steve Heather she is sharing a somacoustic research into sound and the nervous system exploring the socio-political potential of psychoacoustics. She is studying ancestral herbal medicine and their potential to build and re-generate a social more than human body. With Kitti Zsiga and Shelley Etkin she shares artistic research methodologies for combining intercultural plant knowledge with somatic work and questions of social transformation in the Social-Body Apothecary.
Under the name of SXS Enterprise, she collaborated with documentary film maker Xander de Boer and composer and musician Steve Heather. Coming from different disciplines SXS Enterprise explored the field of performance as a possibility of aesthetic reflection and experience. They activated different genres such as live film, story telling, rock opera, musical, lecture performance and choreography. With them they tackled, subjects such as fear production, togetherness, community, economy, happiness, and the relation to the non-human.
She initiated Woman On Work – We work here, a research and exchange platform of Berlin based female artists, that engages in forms of articulating artistic practice through the specific perspective and conditioning of living and working in Berlin.
With a keen interest in radical pedagogies Siegmar teaches seminars and workshops colliding philosophical investigations with performance methodologies, regularly at DasArts, Amsterdam, DOCH, Stockholm, Folkwang Universität Essen, HZT Berlin, Bard College Berlin, Studium Generale UdK Berlin.
Next to her artistic work she has been teaching ethical leadership, non-violent communication, conflict management and negotiation mostly to worker representatives / works councils in the corporate world, since 1991.
Siegmar was born and raised in Romania, studied philosophy, and comparative literature in Freiburg, Berlin and London and Performance at DasArts in Amsterdam.
siegmar zacharias 