The Dust in Bed

Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT] is a multidisciplinary queer "artivist" from Ghana, who investigates gender stereotypes, prejudices, queerness, identity politics and conflicts, sexual stigma and their consequences for marginalized groups or individuals. “The Dust in Bed” is a new performance created during artist’s residence in the Atelier Mondial in Basel during Culturescapes 2023 Sahara. The dust in bed is a metaphor of laying in bed with death and life. The project is inspired by healing rituals, radical resistance, intimate violence and the paradox of death. It is to confront our own sense of becoming through a series of intimate pains and radical joy while reimagining our becoming as a protest, revolutionary and reclamation. As a black trans body whose life is inseparable from her artivism, SHit have always conceived the journey of becoming as a disinclination to accept the conventions that erase our history. The project will bring together clinical materials, found objects, the live body, fabrics, butchers' apparatus, and the earth into an installation of a theatrical ward where the audience can experience an alternative reality of death and healing. Produced within the framework of the symposium Shores of Sahara-Sahel: Waves, Forms, Futures held by Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.  Public artist talk: Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT] will be a part of the lecture series by the Center for African Studies in Basel on 10.10.2023 from 10.15 a.m. to 12.00 p.m.