ThiccPhatUTOPIAS

ThiccPhatUTOPIAS, round two! Because Vienna wants more! More queer, fat-positive fantasies, hot beats, anti-racist art and captivating performances! We’re celebrating against ableism, against fat-hatered and hate speech!

Résistance as a practice of art
We’re celebrating to dance weight discrimination into dust and ashes! ThiccPhatUTOPIAS – la Résistance! brings multi-dimensional fat power, queer-feminist dancing, trans joy and gay-ing to the WUK.

We’re striving to make this event as accessible as possible, incorporating what we learnt from the first edition and creating a space that challenges racism! People from marginalised communities in particular are warmly invited to join the party!

With: BORA Murmure, Denise Palmieri, Mzamo and much more 
Curated by: Dshamilja Gosteli

ThiccPhatUTOPIAS is a versatile, accessible mini-festival on one evening, with Kumi More’s poetry providing the political framework for the event. Kumi’s text expresses what so many of us feel and so lovingly puts into words what ThiccPhatUTOPIAS – La Résistance is all about.

When I say Fat I mean 
by Kumi More
inspired by Britten Black Rose Kapri

When I say Fat I mean
The shape of my body
The expanse of my flesh
The way I am situated in this world

When I say Fat I mean
My pussy is cushioned
My ass is a cushion
I am cushioned against vitriol

When I say Fat I mean 
Dips and valleys and folds and hills and 
mountains and greenery
I mean canopy and overgrowth
Undergrowth 
I mean bold brushstrokes of
Color and love

When I say Fat I mean
Black
I mean ancestry and tradition
I mean harvest and fertility
Not of the womb
Of the flesh to be growing
Of the self to be growing

When I say Fat I mean 
I am a product of this society
A product of migration
Of colonialism and desire
Of lust
Of evolution
I am the logical conclusion

When I say Fat I mean 
dis_abled acceptance and tolerance and 
resilience and standing tall 
and pacing and sitting down and lying and resting
and

When I say Fat I mean 
I stretched over the confines you put on yourself 
I am not confined by my body
I am in the confines of my body the 
best version of myself

When I say Fat I mean
I am the permission to be 
as loud and as weird and as small 
and as unfitting unfitted unfit as you are and 
want to be

When I say Fat I mean 
Luxury
In luxury lies decay
I am the promise of demise
Of death
Of failure because, my love, you will fail
We all fail
Why not fail and be free
I am the promise of freedom 

When I say Fat I mean
free
 

Awareness

ThiccPhatUTOPIAS - La Résistance will be supported by an awareness team from AwA*. You can contact the awareness team in advance via email at support@awa-stern.info or on-site by phone at +43 6776 4304100

AwA* works confidentially and takes sides with those affected by discrimination and/or violence. 

Learn more about AwA* at: www.awa-stern.info

 

Credits

Performance:  Birth Tales: Rooms for trans-species resistance and becoming
By and with: BORA Murmure
Concept, 3D animation, sound and visual world: BORA Murmure

Performance: Heavy on Joy 
By:Denise Palmieri 

Poetry: When I say Fat I mean
By: Kumi More

DJ set
By: Mzamo Nondlwana

Curation: ThiccPhatUTOPIAS – la Résistance!
By: Dshamilja Gosteli

About

BORA Murmure (they/them)
is a transdisciplinary artist, world-builder and shapeshifter. They dream and craft multisensory, immersive worlds where the human, the animal and the technological meet — bodies that need no resemblance to ally, spiralled beings always in metamorphosis. In this universe, world-building is a form of resistance, and imagination a way to extend reality.

Denise Palmieri (she/her) 
originally from Brazil and based in Vienna, is a performance artist and curator working at the intersections of experience, consciousness, body, and voice. Her practice examines ritualistic and political dimensions of performance and challenges dominant forms of knowledge production. Her work opens spaces for personal and collective transformation.

Mzamo Nondlwana (they/them)
is a queer, non-binary performing artist originally from Johannesburg, South Africa and currently based in Vienna, Austria. Their work focuses on marginalized bodies and seeks to subvert colonial fantasies. In 2006, they began their formal dance training at Moving Into Dance Mophatong (South Africa). In 2007, they worked with Arrep Theatre for Life. In 2009, they moved to Salzburg, where they completed their formal dance education at SEAD, specializing in contemporary dance and choreography.

Kumi More (no pronouns) 
writes texts and performs on themes of Blackness, disability, queerness, fatness, desire and sex(uality). Joy and a sense of well-being are the goal of Kumi’s work, also as probably the fattest whore in Germany.
https://www.instagram.com/kuminikation/
website: kumi-more.com
Kontakt: iamkumi@posteo.de

Dshamilja Gosteli (they/she) 
is an educational scientist (focus: educational psychology). They work as a curator of social spaces, a lecturer for in-service and future teachers and is a retired composer and musician. By assembling multi-faced interdisciplinary projects, she works as a first-generation, self-funded PhD candidate on their dissertation at the Department of Education at the University of Vienna. In their work as FupaMagic, their artistic alter ego, she intertwines pleasures of olfactory artistic spaces for perception, empowering experience, education, dance, museal realms, audiovisual art, and performance with glittery celebrations of all bodies. She works in Vienna (AT), Bern, Zurich and Basel (CH), Bielefeld and Berlin (DE), as an educator and facilitator, researcher, artist and musician. By deconstructing heteronormativity, racism and ableism, they create meaningful pieces of sustainable QUEER resistance for Black joy and fat-liberation in Europe.