The duration of the performance is approx. 40 minutes.

Die Performance dauert ca. 40 Minuten.

DIY on wheels
On Skateboarding, Community, and the Art of Falling

In sk8r grrrl, Flora Renhardtand Maria Mam reimagine the act of skateboarding as a choreographic, feminist practice. Between wood, wheels, and rhythm, they build and dismantle, finding freedom in play, risk, and imperfection. Inspired by the Riot Grrrl movement and the FLINTA* skate scene, their work celebrates self-empowerment, collectivity, and the joy of defying expectations.
In this interview, they talk about translating the DIY spirit of skate culture into performance, what failure can teach about balance, and how skating together became a way of rethinking community.

Your performance sk8r grrrl transforms the stage into a skatepark — a space of construction, deconstruction, and play. Could you tell us more about how this idea developed and what drew you to connect skateboarding and performance?

Flora: I think in every community there are certain unwritten rules of how to approach things and what the goals are. Through making a performance with skateboarding Maria and I got the chance to experience our passion through a new lens. Besides wanting to learn tricks, we suddenly have been looking for silly ways to skate or spectacular ways of failing. This approach opened up for me a beautiful space, where Maria and I can express ourselves in a non-judgemental environment.

Maria: At the core of our praxis, playfulness got a lot of space. The skatepark is the place made for skaters to practice and explore the possibilities of skateboarding. There we had been meeting and training together since the beginning. The idea of building our own ramps, inventing un-skateable objects and therefore building fantastic material was a main drive for us. Especially because our focus was on the unexpected possibilities those obstacles could provide.

The work takes inspiration from the Riot Grrrl movement — could you elaborate on what this movement means to you personally, and how its feminist and DIY spirit translates into your artistic practice?

Flora: The artists of the riot grrrl movement were fighting for their space to exist in a male-dominated scene. Often when I perceive patriarchal structures, I have the desire to defy them. It also means taking responsibility and being in charge of something. This works as an analogy with the DIY concept: Knowing you made or changed something with your own hands, out of your own ideas makes me feel proud and confident.
Maria for example was mainly constructing our wooden ramps. I wouldn’t even have thought that I could build something like it. But now that I witnessed her, I feel empowered to saw, cut and screw the next ramp myself.

Maria: From the riot grrl movement I take the radical critic on gender roles, the desire to give voice and representation to experiences that are canonically not attributed to “womanhood/girlhood” and the need to build a strong network of sisters that supports each other navigating a society that normalizes abuse. From this attitude we can derive that the DIY spirit has also an empowering connotation, as it stimulated us to work around creative solutions, learn new skills and in general feel more independent and self secure about how much it is possible to achieve, especially when supported by an organic community of Flinta people.

sk8r grrrl explores notions of balance, failure, and empowerment. How do you navigate these physical and emotional dynamics in your performance?

Flora: One doesn’t go without the other. If you want to learn skating, you’ll fail several times along the way. Therefore it’s super rewarding, when you then actually manage to master a new trick. For the performance we try to open this process of learning to the audience.

Maria: It all came very natural as these three notions are directly intertwined to each other. To reach balance, it is necessary to undergo failure. The process of learning how to progress and achieve an equilibrium, it is in itself a very empowering experience. So in our performance we just show all of it.

The piece also feels like a celebration of community — particularly of the FLINTA* skate scene. What role does community play in your process – on and off the board?

Flora: For me having a community of Flinta* people skating in Vienna, made skating possible for me. I wanted to learn how to skate for years, but I never knew anyone that I could identify within my surrounding, who could show me how to do it. Once I started going to Flinta Skate Sessions everyone there was super helpful and welcoming. I think this joy and support of skating with one another, we carried then in the rehearsal space and translated it now into the performance.

Maria: The Flinta community has been for me a wonderful surprise I encountered in Vienna. From the people active in the scene I got my motivation to skate, but also my first board, bearings and skate shoes. It gives me a lot of motivation to see my peers engaging in taking spaces, raising voices and landing sick tricks. I feel with this piece I want to expand, share and in a way give back all the support and energy I had received in the past years.

How to reinvent skateboarding: Displaying a punk attitude and a lot of DIY, Flora Renhardt and Maria Mam will transform the venue at WUK into a skatepark for their performance sk8r grrrl. They will assemble, construct and deconstruct. On the trail of famous feminist movement Riot Grrrls, the two artists will find freedom in skating as they claim a space that welcomes friction as well as softness and liberation. Flora Renhardt and Maria Mam play with materiality, imagining ways to overcome un-skatable objects and to subvert dated gender roles and facing audience expectations with humour and softness. In a choreographed balance between safety, control and chaos, they will roll from ecstatic, liberating self-empowerment towards crashing and failing – and then back again, developing a new logic for their own visual and emotional language to depict fantasies and utopias.

sk8r grrrl can also be called a tribute to the FLINTA* skating scene, a galaxy of places, people and practices that coined the artists’ desire to skate and conquer open spaces. A dialogue among like-minded sister circles, where everyone supports each other.