CUM AS YOU ARE by Hannah Schaich
55On the first evening of the symposium, we will be devoting ourselves to the topic of female sexuality and self-determination with Hanna Schaich and her film CUM AS YOU ARE.
Anyone who assumes that the imperative of the title is an identity-political statement inherent in the zeitgeist is thinking too small. Instead, one is overwhelmed by a declaration of strength from the ur-feminine, which rattles with power.
As is typical for her, Hanna Schaich's piece is rooted in the autobiographical. She raises her voice radically, leading others who are angry to join in her own anger. Together they show how sex can be experienced with all the senses, with body and mind. All scenes are carried by poetry that sounds like the threat of a new world order, accompanied by raw, metallic music.
Shouted at as viewers, we are challenged to explore thought spaces and possibilities of different visions of the future. What if the mental and physical wounds that we supposedly experienced individually contain a collective energy to resist? What if we splash, dance, eat, whip away a society locked in shame and norms? Or even abolish it?
What if the anger of all combatants living within existing and past patriarchal structures that they have endured, suffered or died from, what if that anger became an overwhelming, transformative energy that makes us liberated, nonconformist and noisy, ready for a positive change? Then we fight for a state of uncompromising being. For love freed from shame. For life as it could be. Orgiastic alive. Buckle up for this ride through wild-wild-witch-clity-city. And: CUM AS YOU ARE.
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Hanna Schaich is a queer video artist, pornographic filmmaker, immersive performance poet and activist with a post-graduate degree in Performance and Interactive Media Art from Brooklyn College, New York (2017) and an MFA from Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee (2015). Her works deal with the individual search for identity, the body and its possibilities of communication. The focus is on dealing with the innermost being and the attempt to build bridges to the outside world from there, to enter into dialogue with others. Her most recent works are characterized, among other things, by the processing of autobiographical trauma (sexual abuse, forced admission to violence) and the focus on liveliness, regaining pleasure and liberation from social coercive norms.
