This month's conversation with punkrocker preacher drag performer activist and promoter BLEACH. Essex raised, Berlin Based Drag performer BLEACH is a central figure in the German capitals queer underground. Creating parties, shows & festivals. Starting out in a burlesque bar in Stockholm she entertains with a fiery mix of punking, stripping & speeching. A regular host of Berlin club nights, drag shows with a loud point of view. When DJing she plays a wide range of music to keep dancers on their toes, acidy house with sparks of rock n roll punk tunes. BLEACH is front woman of BLEACH and the Bumholes

https://bleach.blog/

In this episode, Mad Kate sits down with Bleach — a Berlin-based drag performer, chef, and queer artist originally from Essex — for a wide-ranging conversation about persona, performance, sexuality, and politics. They trace the evolution of Bleach's characters from Baby Chino (a homoerotic, tongue-in-cheek art persona born in Stockholm) to the fierce, unapologetically political drag queen Bleach, and explore how these alter egos have served as vehicles for processing identity, anger, and queer community. The conversation moves through social media, consent and sexual politics, the economics of drag, and ultimately arrives at the role of the artist in a world of rising fascism — concluding that drag's most radical act may simply be giving people a good time.

TRACKS played:

Mad Kate - My Fear of Pretending (feat. Lori Baldwin)

My conversation this month is with queer and feminist cultural historian, educator, podcaster, and public speaker Ramzi Fawaz.

https://www.ramzifawaz.com/

https://www.instagram.com/nerdfromthefuture/

Ramzi Fawaz is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and host of the podcast "Nerd from the Future". He is the author of two books, including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016) and Queer Forms (2022), both published by NYU Press. The New Mutants received the 2017 ASAP Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Fawaz is a contributing editor to Film Quarterly, where he writes a column titled “Imagination Unbound.” He is also a co-editor of the NYU Press book series Postmillennial Pop with Gayle Wald and Aaron Trammell. Fawaz is currently working on a new book project titled _How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World._ In it, he argues for a rethinking of humanities education as a form of collective psychedelic therapy, which uses literature, art, and media, rather than psychoactive medicines, to induce positive, long-term transformations in students’ mental wellbeing. As part of this project, He recently edited a special issue of _South Atlantic Quarterly_ on the topic of “Psychedelic Imaginaries,” which was published in April 2025.

We talk about teaching as an act of love, psychedelics as tools for loosening rigid thought, and how imagination can help us live with difference instead of fearing it. Ramzi describes entering the classroom as a “radiant light,” grounded, joyful, and fully present with students. At the heart of his pedagogy is **attention as care**: treating students as people worth listening to, challenging them without shaming, and creating a "cone of trust" where risk, disagreement, and mistakes are part of learning. Ramzi shares insights from his upcoming book, **How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World**, arguing that both art and psychedelic experience can soften hardened thinking and help us approach human difference with curiosity rather than fear. Together we ask: How do we practice being with people we don’t agree with? How do we act when theory fails us? How do we cultivate imagination that changes the world rather than escapes it?

We mention:

Hannah Arendt (enlarged mentality)

Linda Zerilli (_Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom_)

Judith Butler (performativity and grieveability)

Lauren Berlant (cruel optimism)

The movie Everything Everywhere All At Once_

The series Heated Rivalry

My conversation this month is with producer, musician, activist and creative technologist Sky Deep.

Sky Deep is a Berlin-based live performer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer

whose work fuses raw emotion, social consciousness, and technical mastery. Born in

Los Angeles and shaped by the underground scenes of New York and Berlin, she

merges electronic music, live instrumentation, and performance art into electrifying,

genre-defying shows.

A driving force in queer and POC visibility within electronic music, Sky founded

Reclaim the Beats Festival and leads her label Reveller Records as a platform for

community-driven experimentation. As MIDI-Music Director and core

multi-instrumentalist for Peaches’ OOPS Tour (2020), she helped sculpt the tour’s

radical live sound architecture — extending her artistry from club stages to global

arenas.

Her sonic imagination also extends into film, television, and theater: she created

sound design for Shu Lea Cheang’s feature UKI, served as music supervisor for

Loving Her (ZDFneo), and designs sound for productions at Ballhaus

Naunynstrasse and other major German theaters. Every project carries her

signature spirit — joyful, unapologetic, and deeply human.

https://www.skydeepofficial.com/

cover photo by Alexa Vachon

S4E12-SWEAT-PODCAST-Sky-Deep-RC2 by Mad Kate

My guest this month is transdisciplinary artist Isaiah Lopaz, whose work revolves around collage, photography, text, and performance. Born in occupied Tongvaland to a working class African American family, Lopaz is a descendent of Igbo / West African / Geechee / African American / First Nations peoples. His work frequently focuses on tracing where histories often framed as disparate and distinct, overlap and converge. The past, sacred stories and practices, genealogy, and personal mythologies are merged in Lopaz’ practice to underscore intersections of time and space.

Artistic research that engages African, Creole, and First Nations epistemologies, cosmologies, and methodologies are essential to his work. Lopaz’ research has been supported through stipends, fellowships, scholarships, and residencies from institutions including: The Berlin Senat for Culture and Europe, the documenta Institut, Stiftung Kunstfonds, Theater Rotterdam, the University of Bayreuth, Flutgraben, Ebenböck Haus, and Zucker Erben. Lopaz has exhibted and performed at events and institutions including the 10th Berlin Biennale, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the Neues Museum, Kunstverein Hamburg, The HAU, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Beursschouwburg, and the 7th Afroeuropean Biennale. His work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Der Speigel, and ZDF. In the spring of 2024, Lopaz founded Black Visual Grammar, a mobile archive which engages Black perspectives on an array of themes and subjects through collage workshops which coincide with public exhibitions.

https://www.isaiahlopaz.com/about

Featured Artwork: "The Last Book My Father Read". Collage by Isaiah Lopaz

Authors mentioned in this episode:

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Natasha A. Kelly

Grada Kilomba

Wangechi Mutu

Carrie Mae Weems

Ekow Eshun

We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we fuck, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.

You can find out more https://www.alfabus.us/s-w-e-a-t/

Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, sound designer, performance artist and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004, expanding their unique identity-queering, genderfcking and sexpositive performative work throughout music, theatre and film. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world.

Fiorella Montero-Diaz is a Senior Lecturer in ethnomusicology at Keele University. She has a degree in Sound Engineering and Piano Performance from Peru, her country of birth. She later moved to the UK where she was awarded several international student excellence grants and graduated with distinction from Goldsmiths – University of London (MA in Ethnomusicology, 2008) and Royal Holloway – University of London (PhD in Music, 2014). In 2015 she was appointed as Keele’s first Lecturer in Ethnomusicology.

Dr Montero-Diaz is known nationally and internationally for placing music and the arts at the centre of debates on race and class equality, anti-racist strategies, conflict transformation and the creation of new citizenships within contemporary post-conflict urban societies. Her impactful work has contributed to shaping cultural policies in Peru, and has been lauded by ministers, policymakers, and human rights and peace organisations in Latin America.

Dr Fiorella Montero-Diaz has an extensive record of leadership and cross-institutional engagement. She was Director of Programmes for Music and Music Technology at Keele University (2018-2022), where she had a leading role in the creation of new UG creative programmes and development of new courses. Between 2014-2017 she was the General Administrator and Archivist of the British Forum of Ethnomusicology, during this period she built the BFE’s first historical archive. She sat on the Executive Board of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and the Equalities, Diversity and Inclusion in Music Studies Network. Now, she is the new Chair of the BFE, the first indigenous, queer and non native English speaker who leads this important subject association. In recognition of her contribution to advancing EDI in Higher Education, Dr Montero-Diaz was awarded the 2020 Stonewall Role Model of the Year Regional Award and the 2019 Keele Excellence Award.

Dr Montero-Diaz’ research generates transformative, interdisciplinary approaches to the intersection between music, social inclusion and new citizenships. She was recently awarded as Principal Investigator a GCRF Networking Grant from the Academy of Medical Sciences for “Sounding a Queer Rebellion: LGBTI Musical Resistances in Latin America” (2020), which is building an interdisciplinary network of 13 partners in South American countries.

We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we fuck, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.

In this month's "Spat Back At Ya" positionality conversation, Berlin legend Bleach has SPAT the questions back at host Mad Kate.

Every couple of years, S.W.E.A.T. host Mad Kate likes to do a "positionality check-in" about where they are coming from and where they are at in their on-going research about the body in LABOUR. In this very special episode, in collaboration with BLEACH for her new Berlin based zine SPAT Mag!, Berlin drag artist, DJ and punk icon BLEACH has taken on the job of being the interviewer and Mad Kate is the interviewee.

Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, dancer, performer, sxwkr and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004 after completing a Bachelor of Honors in Peace and Conflict Studies with an emphasis on Gender and Sustainability from UC Berkeley, and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing and Consciousness at New College in California.

Thinking through an expansive definition of “queer(ing) the body” as a political process unfolding across time and space, Mad Kate integrates their political activism into performance, critiquing consumer capitalism, border regimes, migration policy, and the military-prison-industrial complex. They situate the queer body in a wide range of activist and performative contexts—from clubs, to darkrooms to theaters, from street protests and migrant shelters to protest camps—foregrounding the extractive logics of capitalism and the violent entanglements of militarism, consumerism, and border control. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world. As a sound designer they are committed to the use of field recording and context-specific development of works that resist extractivist artistic practices.

At the heart of all of their performative projects is the written word—whether their electronic project HYENAZ, their postpunk project Mad Kate the Tide or their solo performance work—they write first in essay form and then extract poems and lyrics from those longer written forms.

BLEACH is ...

Essex raised, Berlin Based Drag performer is a central figure in the German capital's queer underground, creating parties, shows & festivals. Starting out in a burlesque bar in Stockholm she entertains with a fiery mix of punking, stripping & speeching. A regular host of Berlin club nights, drag shows with a loud point of view. When DJing she plays a wide range of music to keep dancers on their toes, acidy house with sparks of rock n roll punk tunes.

More about BLEACH !

spatmag.net

https://bmerch.live/

https://www.instagram.com/bleach.babychino/

Cover Image by Javier Alejandro Cerrada

This month's conversation is with artist and healer Sārāh Mārtinus. Sārāh Mārtinus (she/they) is a research-informed artist and ancestral lineage healer. Her work focuses on relational kinship & contradiction (non dual, ritual) practice, decentralizing, deconditioning, and decolonizing through process-led co-emergence and intrapsychic ecologies. She writes, paints, and creates sound through centralising darkness, transformation, and intersectional shadow integrations, her multi-media practice operating as a form of processual meaning-making - locating wound within cultures of disappearances.

As descendant of both migrating Sri Lankan diaspora and Irish settling colonies, Sarah came into being on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of Woiwurrung language group, in Kulin Nation; the Traditional Custodians of Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Her lineages weave through South Asia & Europe, outwards/inwards, reconciling in rivers of reparation, remembrance

Her work is currently published through 'unbecomings', Zilberman Gallery, Berlin (October, 2025), curated by Misal Adnan Yildiz after their constellating of performance dialogues ‘When one of us remembers who we really are, all of us remember’ at Pickle Bar, Berlin (June, 2025).

Sārāh offers one on one sessions and community ceremony, with ritual and witness counsel for power rebalance.

www.sarahmartinus.com @sarahmartinus

We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we fuck, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.

You can find out more https://www.alfabus.us/s-w-e-a-t/

Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, sound designer, performance artist and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004, expanding their unique identity-queering, genderfcking and sexpositive performative work throughout music, theatre and film. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world.

Cover Photo: Mathilda Bernmark

This month's conversation is with erotic performer and activist Chiqui Love.

Chiqui Love is a burlesque and striptease artist and storyteller with over 22 years of experience. A power femme and co-founding member of two strippers’ collectives—East London Strippers Collective and Berlin Strippers Collective—she works to de-stigmatize sex work and open a dialogue around more ethical ways of providing and consuming erotic entertainment. Her approach centers on empowering workers and welcoming every gender and body shape. She is a passionate advocate for fair working conditions and for putting women at the forefront of any conversation involving bodily autonomy, pleasure, and freedom.

Chiqui Love’s mission is to raise awareness—especially among women—encouraging them to enjoy their bodies unashamedly and embrace their inner bitch-ass goddess.

S.W.E.A.T. features conversations about performance and performativity of the sexual/ized body at work—work as labour of survival and labour of a/Art with host Mad Kate.

We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we fuck, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.

You can find out more https://www.alfabus.us/s-w-e-a-t/

Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, sound designer, performance artist and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004, expanding their unique identity-queering, genderfcking and sexpositive performative work throughout music, theatre and film. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world.

This months conversation is with Sami Rhymes, an International Award-Winning Spoken Word Artist, Poet and Author from London, UK. She also works in Project Management and as a Freelance Creative.

Sami had her first poem published at the age of 9 in a young writers anthology. She released her debut collection 20 Something in 2020 and has contributed poems to other publications including It Will Be: The Black Experience and the Words By anthology.

From the playground to groundbreaking stages, Sami has performed and headlined at a number of public and private events & festivals in London, nationally and abroad in Malaysia and Greece. She has also won International Slams in New Zealand, Abu Dhabi and locally in the UK.

She has featured on a number of local radio stations including BBC Radio London. Sami has also appeared on ITV News London S1:E3 of the BAFTA winning Sky Arts commissioned TV show Life & Rhymes and Islam Channel to name a few.

2022 saw Sami pick up “Best Female Spoken Word Poet” and also marked the release of her Debut EP Triple Threat . 2023 saw Sami take her rhymes to adverts, new stages and cities. From her first Sofar Sounds to her first Glastonbury Festival Sami continues to grow as a creative. Her next album and book are in progress with the audio “Silent Battles” set to be released first in 2025. Sami is also preparing the script for a one woman show which she will showcase in the near future.

Sami uses rhyme as a means of release and therapy and through her spoken word inspires people in her community to speak up and take action. Her poetry touches on everything from identity to communities and places, relationships, mental health, injustices and day to day experiences. She also facilitates workshops, presents talks, ghostwrites and takes on commissions for bespoke requests.

https://samirhymes.com/

We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we fuck, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.

You can find out more https://www.alfabus.us/s-w-e-a-t/

Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, sound designer, performance artist and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004, expanding their unique identity-queering, genderfcking and sexpositive performative work throughout music, theatre and film. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world.

Cover Photo: Nick Margiolas

My Fear of Pretending by Mad Kate (featuring Lori Baldwin)

Random Rambles by Sami Rhymes