Essay by Jacob Fabricius
How can you just leave me standing?
Dig, if you will, the picture. Of you and I engaged in a kiss. The sweat of your body covers me. Can you, my darling, can you picture this? Dream, if you can, a courtyard. An ocean of violets in bloom. Animals strike curious poses. They feel the heat, the heat between me and you.*
Can you feel the space between me and you? Can you feel the space between you and the body next to you? Can you feel the space between the performer and you? Dig, if you will. Engage, if you will. Feel, if you will. Sweat, if you will. Pose, if you will. Listen, if you will. Touch, if you will, my stomach.
When starting to write this introduction about the performers at Liste 2025, the song “When Doves Cry” by Prince and the Revolution slowly emerged in my mind.
“When Doves Cry” has nothing to do with the performers at Liste, but there is something about its fluidity, it soft curves and sharp edges, its sweaty and oily bodies, its fragile and whining guitars, its gentleness and seductive lyrics, that makes me think of the relational spaces that performers inhabit. It makes me think of relationships. Of relations between bodies. Between bodies in spaces. Between bodies performing. Between bodies watching bodies. Between bodies engaging in spaces inhabited by performing bodies. How can you just leave me standing?
“When Doves Cry” makes me ask: how can a word or a sentence capture a body’s movement? How can the moments of a movement be portrayed within a frame, a picture, a song? How do the body’s subtle gestures leave me standing, make me listen? A good performance tames me, overwhelms me, puzzles me, and leaves me wanting to experience it again. I want to hold on to the moment (don’t you?). Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
“When Doves Cry” makes me wonder: how close is too close? Can I be the make-up on your eyes? Can I engage in a soft accordion scream? Can I shower myself with your sounds and wear your mask? What is behind your mask? What is under your feet? Can you tell me how you make that seaweed whistle? Can you, my darling, can you picture this? How can the tiniest sound have the power of thunder? Why do we scream at each other?
Once, a lover told me to take mental photographs and showed me how to shape four fingers into a rectangle and to take photos with my mind as the camera. Since then, I have photographed the sea, the sunset, the naked body, flowers, and performances. I keep the images on my internal hard drive and recall them occasionally. For six days I ask you to experience the performers. For six days I ask you to stay with me. Watch the performers’ hands. Watch their feet. Just watch. Closely. Feel how it trembles inside.
Taste the future in Søren Aagaard’s dark sci-fi fantasy cooking session and in the human-like bodies being copied in Éva Mag’s sensual yet dystopian performance. Take a closer look at how Enad Marouf portrays a cruising dance between two strangers – a dance of desire but also of uncertainty and unknown longing. You’ve got the butterflies all tied up.
Journey into the intimacy of Korean shamanic practice with Hyeji Nam, who reroutes identity as well as spiritual and cultural codes through the body, movement, and masks. Rush after bodies and topics relating to domestic spaces during Juliette Blightman’s performances that push the boundaries between private moments and shared collective intimacy. Don’t make me chase you, even doves have pride.
Experience how Jules Fischer strives to create work that is political yet moving and intimate by embracing our closest relations and destructive emotional patterns. Feel how Adam Christensen poetically tears his queer heart out and presents the torn edges with all their vulnerable anxieties in songs and drawings. Explore ecological transformation and the South Korean history of “sea women” through a multisensory sonic performance by Yujin Jung. This is what it sounds like. When doves cry.
Forget the rush you felt a moment ago and let yourself go. Listen to the glitching sparkles of the sun hitting the soft waves. For six days I ask you to leave me standing. To stay here if you can. Maybe I’m just too demanding.
* Underlined phrases are lyrics from the song “When Doves Cry” by Prince and the Revolution, released on 16 May 1984.
Performances
Adam Christensen, Lene
The performance is a tribute to Adam's mother, who passed away last spring. It incorporates various sound recordings from her final weeks—texts, songs accompanies by Adam performing with his accordion. Paper will serve as the backdrop, taped to the large windows, where he will create live drawings. By tearing holes in the paper, Adam will let the light pass through.
Søren Aagaard, Cafe Zero [Liste Edition 2025]
Performers: Søren Aagaard, Holger Hartvig and Markus Oxelman
Cafe Zero is a sci-fi fantasy cooking session exploring the New Nordic movement and an uncertain future. The audience witnesses the preparation and tasting of a menu made from local ingredients. Set on a campsite with two tents, performers enact communal rituals, cooking and discussing microorganisms’ roles in health and environmental crises. Accompanied by microbe songs by Holger Hartvig. Costumes by Anne Sofie Madsen.
Éva Mag, Operation Analysis – One Waxes a Body
Performers: Alberto Papparotto and Rondi Park
A large casting mould is prominently displayed in the room as two performers methodically melt and pour wax into its frame. Over time, they carefully extract a human-sized wax figure from the mould, place it gently on the floor and then melt it down again in an endless, cyclical ritual.
Juliette Blightman, After Party A/W 25/26
Performers: Sarafina Beck and Harumi Mumenthaler
Sound: Wayne Binitie and Art Lewy
After Party moves the audience through a 12-minute composition by Wayne Binitie and Art Lewy which was specially created with the paintings and garments of Juliette Blightman’s work A/W 25/26. The soundtrack draws on multiple genres, from classical to modern, and acts like that of an after-party playlist, moving through different energies of an evening. Dancers Sarafina Beck and Harumi Mumenthaler interpret the movement in relation to the paintings and soundtrack. Along with catwalk models, they wear a selection of Blightman’s A/W 25/26 collection, featuring garments that draw on elements from paintings in the artist’s installation House Party as well as photographic imagery of fireworks and other monumental buildings.
Juliette Blightman, House Party
MetLife (after IG), Vauxhall’s Pleasure Garden, Building 1, Schade
All Gouache on canvas, 2025
House Party is a painting installation featuring distinctive buildings from London, New York, Basel and Turin. Recognisable landmarks emerge from abstract landscapes, creating a visual experience of urban spaces. The paintings act like lighthouses, orienting the viewer in time and place while offering an alternative reality. Painted on calico with graphite and gouache, they reflect the transition from day to night. A photographic print shows the view from Carol Rama’s kitchen in Turin towards the Mole Antonelliana. The installation is displayed on the fair’s mezzanine level and reflects a sense of otherness on the way to the main fair hall. House Party is part of the 12-minute performance After Party A/W 25/26.
Jules Fischer, Lesions
Performer: Lydia Östberg Diakité
Voice: Susanne Sachße
Soundtrack: Aase Nielsen & holger hartvig
Light design: Sofia Stål
Lesions is centered around a text interweaving Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie and the TV show Designing Women. The text is spoken by iconic German actress Susanne Sachße and performed as a lipsync. The space is dictated by a rotating spotlight—at times like an oncoming truck, at others a relentless theatrical light—shifting between blinding and illuminating both performer and audience. Through the performance we witness her gradual depletion and absurd struggle to maintain a certain form, trapped in a narrative and scene over which she has little control.
Yujin Jung, Longing Energies: Ceremonial Recurrence
Performers: Yujin Jung (with chef Markus Oxleman)
Ceremonial Recurrence is a live cooking performance, part of the artist’s ‘Longing Energies’ series, exploring ecological transformation through the preparation of seaweed soup, a dish traditionally served for postpartum care. Inspired by haenyeo divers in South Korea, Jung weaves together sound, ritual and the stories of the sea. The performance concludes with the communal sharing of the soup as a gesture of nourishment and interconnectivity.
Enad Marouff, And Now It Is Night
Performers: Jao Moon and Samuel Pereira
Sound: Bell Towers
For the performance program of Liste, Enad Marouf is presenting an Iteration / Stanza for two dancers from his performance “And Now It is Night”. “And Now It is Night“ portrays a cruising dance between two strangers—a dance of desire, but also of uncertainty and the unknown, a condition we all might endure. The process of emergence and disappearance of movement, language, sound and the fragmented interplay between these formal elements is an invitation to witness a nonlinear story: an unfolding meditation on grief, desire, memory and uncertainty.
A production by Enad Marouf, in co-production with K3 | Tanzplan Hamburg. Supported by the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of NEUSTART KULTUR.
Hyeji Nam, MANSHIN
In this durational ritual, Hyeji Nam empties herself to host a parade of mutable heads. Inflected by Korean shamanic practice, breath, white noise and shifting physicalities suffuse the space. She then cleanses it, again and again, in a continuous loop to welcome the next head. Glitchmasks reroute identity tags, spiritual and cultural codes and sensory data. Each head claims the body before slipping back into the void, while viewers drift between shrine and scifi lab, witnessing identity flicker, shed and reboot in real time.