At Artforum, Travis Jeppesen reports from the Yo! Sissy queer music festival in Berlin. Despite the city’s relentless gentrification, the festival demonstrated that the avant-garde is alive and well there.
If in Berlin the days have a tendency to bleed into one another forming a sort of haze—a gray one, to be precise, punctuated with rare bursts of sunshine—then the fabric of the nights is most definitely a fuzz of whirling dance-floor lights, glitter, make-up, and bodies of every and any and no gender in various states of undress. Amid the noise, the excitement, the inner violence of our daily exercises in being and creating, it can be easy to forget that we are living among a bevy of talented creatures. Yo! Sissy, the city’s premiere queer music festival, became the first event ambitious enough to unite them all, people who have often collaborated, bartended, DJ’d, binge-watched RuPaul’s Drag Race episodes, drank, snorted drugs, quarreled, laughed, cried, barfed, and slept together—but not necessarily all in the same place and at the same time. Spread over the last weekend in July, there were three different times and three different places where sonic and performative fabulosities of all crypto-perverse shadings could be shaken out and reveled in, reminding us—and our distinguished visitors—that despite (or because of) our occasional petty rivalries, our rampant inconsistencies, and our often blazing bouts of incoherency, Berlin is still the homeland of the twenty-first century avant-garde, and these are the people that make it so.
Photo of Peaches by Jason Harrell. Via Artforum.