Mazlum Nergiz

Mazlum Nergiz

Opleiding
DAS Theatre
Lichting
2021

Mazlum Nergiz is a writer and dramaturg based in Amsterdam. In 2019, he received the Essay Prize awarded by the literary magazine EDIT (Leipzig, Germany). He collaborates with theaters and literary institutions on national and international scales. He mentors the international playwright's program of the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. In 2018, he curated the international performance festival "War or Peace" at Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theater. As a dramaturg, he conceptualized devised theatre productions and new playwrighting with directors such as Falk Richter, Lola Arias, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, Data Tavadze and Marie Bues. In November 2019, the 5-channel video installation PARADISE, a collaborative piece developed together with Leyla Yenirce, opened the festival „Digifem“ at Kampnagel (Hamburg, Germany). Currently, he works on several radio plays, one being an adaption for German national broadcast "Deutschlandradio Kultur" being streamed in August 2020.

DAS Theatre Research

His artistic and curatorial research at DAS sits within queer and fragile architectures of sexuality at the crossroads of voyeurism, pain, love and intimacy and carries the working title COMA.

sleep: ko¯ma in Ancient Greek is a noun used to describe the lethargic state called “coma”, yet it is not a medical term. Besides many meanings, it describes the profound, weird, sexual sleep that takes over Zeus after love with Hera.

What is it that materially characterizes the sexual subjectivities of individuals who participate in unconventional plural sexualities and practices? COMA is an auto-ethnography of desire, purity and impurity in semi-public cruising spaces. Parks, cemeteries, bushes, cinemas: the ephemeral houses of the queer cruisers. The late queer theorist José Estaban Muñoz points out that „queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence (…) When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.1“

Exploring libertinism as an expression of sexuality within a marginal heteronormativity touches upon contemporary political and personal conflict zones of how power relations of heteronormativity affects every living body that expresses forms of desire and lust.

In the form of a ritualized, complex environment containing artistic and curatorial interventions, COMA embarks on a journey of interconnection, loss and destruction —

COMA will be a garden for contemplation, a garden as a space of constant transgressions, a garden as as a container to reflect upon the aforementioned issues.

COMA transcends the special interest of gay cruisers and is claims to understand new ways of thinking, living, loving and belonging together.

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