Siegmar Zacharias

Siegmar Zacharias is a performance maker, researcher, curator. She explores the politics of alienation & intimacy in embodied thinking/being with matter and matters in collaborations with humans and non-humans.
Her work has been shown internationally. It develops formats of performances, installations, discursive encounters dealing with questions of agency, ecology of artistic practice, modes of visceral rationalities. Learning from uncontrollable materials like, smoke, slime, swamps, earthquakes, the nervous system I am working towards a posthuman feminist poet(h)ics. Recent works include: Slime Dynamics; The Cloud: a cosmochoreography; Dirty Talk; invasive hospitality; The Other Thing 12-24hrs immersive research (#1 liquefied encounters, #2 intimacy with death). series: ecologies of artistic practice

Siegmar studied philosophy und comp. Lit. in Berlin (FU) and London (UCL) and performance at DasArts Amsterdam. She teaches internationally and is a regular guest lecturer at DOCH Stockholm, HZT Berlin, Bard College Berlin. Since 1993 she has been working on non-violent communication strategies with workers representatives. She is a Phd candidate at Roehampton University on a AHRC TECHNE scholarship.

My Phd project takes place at the intersection between performance, philosophy and political ecology, and is an investigation of how they perform in the face of each other. It proposes to develop performance practices, a philosophical text, and curatorial formats that formulate a Posthuman Poetics as Ethics of endurance and persistence. Using technologies, practices and poetics developed and derived from performance practice in collaboration with non-human agents (i.e. smoke, slime, electricity, death, nervous system) it focuses on new materialist, feminist approaches, that activate posthuman practices.

I explore performance art as a learning ground for developing and enduring dynamic systems that are not pre-determined, but generative and co-created across divers agents in spite of existing power dynamics. What is at stake is a posthuman poetics as ethics that prepares us to imagine alternative enactments of the world in a time where differences have become processes of discontinuous differentiation. Through material experimentation, critically analysis, creative development and ongoing conceptualisation I research how new materialist thinking, posthuman theory and new performance practices intersect and produce iterations of ethical dynamics.

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