Pogo Bar: Belle Santos 'Matadora'

The performance sketch Matadora deals with the third act of the corrida. The work approaches the ritual scene of the bullfight, its camp aesthetics, the underlying structures of affect and the interwoven codes of masculinity and violence. Matadora is an exploration of power, identity and desire and focuses on the interplay between domination and subjugation, self-destruction and the destruction of others. In close collaboration with Susanne Sachsse, Nile Koetting and Rahel Spöhrer, Belle Santos explores her own Spanish identity, her grandparents' passion for toreros and the history of her family's bull breeding in Andalusia.

Belle Santos is a Berlin-based artist who works in the fields of installation, performance, text and costume design. Her current work explores contemporary expressions and rituals of grief and pain, their service industries and transformative spaces. Her most recent works include the installation MOURNING ROOM III - The Moon is Out Tonight at RAMPE, Stuttgart, and the performative installation THE WAKE at transmediale studio, Silent Green, Berlin, and Theater Neumarkt, Zurich. Her next piece, MOURNING TIME, will be presented in March 2025 at the Kyoto Arts Center, Japan. She participated in a three-month residency at the Goethe Institute's Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto (2022), and residency at PACT Zollverein. Santos is an artist fellow at the Saison Foundation in Tokyo (2018, 2023). This year she received a six-month scholarship from the German Ministry of Culture to research grief and "hysteria" at CITÉ DES ARTS INTERNATIONAL in Paris. She is a founding member of the performance group THE AGENCY, with whom she worked from 2015 to 2022. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at festivals such as the Athens Biennale and Tanz im August. Santos is a co-founder of NEXT WAVES THEATER and GLASSHOUSE, platforms for interdisciplinary experiments in digital performance(www.glasshouse.berlin).

Nile Koetting is an artist who works with a variety of formats including installation, light, performance, scenography and sound. In his artistic projects he explores a new dramaturgy for performative time and space. His works and projects have been presented worldwide in institutions such as Palais de Tokyo, Sharjah Art Foundation, Centre Pompidou x Westbund Museum, CAPC Museum of contemporary Art, Tai Kwun Contemporary, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa, Fondation Hermès Tokyo, Somerset House, Kunstverein Göttingen, Thailand Biennale, ZKM Karlsruhe and Mori Art Museum. Since 2014, he has been living and working in Berlin with the support of the Overseas Study Program for Artists, the Agency for Cultural Affairs Japan and the Pola Art Foundation. In 2023 he was selected as a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council NYC.

Susanne Sachsse is an artist and actress born and raised in East Germany. For over a decade she was a member of numerous German state theater ensembles, including the Berliner Ensemble, where she appeared in productions by Heiner Müller, Einar Schleef and Robert Wilson, among others. Since becoming a freelance artist in 2001, Sachsse's practice has expanded beyond theater to include work as a visual artist, director, author, musician, curator and performer. Her work has developed along three main axes: as a solo artist; as a sought-after collaborator in the fields of art, theater, dance, film and music, e.g. at the Venice Biennale with Yael Bartana (2011) and Natascha Sadr Haghighian (2019) or in the choreography of Ligia Lewis (2018-2020); and as co-founder and director of the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP, in which she maintains a long-term collaboration with Vaginal Davis. In addition to her regular work with artists Bartana, Jonathan Berger, Zach Blas and Phil Collins, Sachsse has also appeared in five films by Canadian queercore filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, including The Raspberry Reich (2004) and Pierrot Lunaire (2012). Sachsse received the Premio Maguey Queer Icon Award at the Guadalajara International Film Festival.

Rahel Spöhrer works as a curator, dramaturge and lecturer at the intersection of performance and visual arts. Since 2021 she has been curatorial director of the artsprogram at Zeppelin University, where she has curated exhibitions with Candice Breitz, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg, among others. She is active in a number of research projects, networks and collaborations at the intersection of visual arts and science and is particularly interested in the role of conflict in artistic collaborations, cultural organizations and society at large. This includes the European training program FEINART, which explores the future of independent art spaces in Europe (2022-2025). During the Covid-19 lockdown, she co-founded "h a p t i c a f f i n i t i e s", a digital study group on touch, haptic aesthetics and intimacy in art. She is also part of the founding team of "Future Art Education", a research project on interdisciplinary teaching, learning and critical pedagogy in art schools at ASFA - Athens School of Fine Arts (2020-2022).