Slow Rave

In the face of doom: Sceneries of the Pachakutiy

In the face of multiple wars, ecological disasters, and social injustices, Western thought quickly resorts to talk of “crisis” or even „doom“. Of apocalypse – a final end, imagined as the closing point on a linear timeline. In the Andean cosmologies of the indigenous cultures of Abya Yala, however, this moment of upheaval has its own name: Pachakutiy. Literally, in the Quechua language, it signifies a reversal or return („kuti“) of the „pacha“ – universe or spacetime – and refers to a radical rupture that inseparably links destruction and new beginnings. Pachakutiy is thus less an endpoint than a cosmic breath: an inversion of order carrying within it the possibility of rebirth. By uniting cycles of decay and renewal, the term invites a rethinking of our concepts of history, nature, and future – not as a linear trajectory of progress, but as a living interplay of destruction and regeneration. Pachakutiy appears as a symbol of the restoration of a possible balance in the world – brought forth through a chaotic sequence of events that manifest both as catastrophe and as a necessary disruption of existing order.
Understood in this sense, Pachakutiy is not only an inspiration for thinking beyond crises but also an aesthetic-political strategy: it calls for the creation of spaces where collapse and renewal, vulnerability and resistance, loss and utopia can coexist. This is precisely where the PLATAFORMA BERLIN festival comes in, primarily presenting perspectives from the Global South – the global majority. As a site of artistic practice, collective encounter, and critical reflection, it brings together voices searching for new forms of coexistence. PLATAFORMA BERLIN becomes a temporary cosmos in which the thinking of Pachakutiy manifests – an invitation to recognize, amid multiple catastrophes, the potentials for transformation, healing, and collective future-making.
„The world as we know it is collapsing. We don’t have to collapse with it.” says Martha Hincapié Charry, curator and founder of the festival, succinctly capturing the orientation of this year’s edition. She adds that the festival envisions a space where colonial wounds can be transformed into a movement of change. Within this tension between vulnerability and resistance, room emerges for a diversity of voices whose stories might otherwise remain silenced…
At the entrance to Black Resistance Practice 1 by Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald, the audience is met by the words of Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Martin Luther King, Frantz Fanon, as well as books such as How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Still Black, Still Strong, and Burn It Down!: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution. These voices of a generational struggle for dignity and identity frame the performance as a space of remembrance and collective action, of anti-colonial and Black resistance – nourished by the histories of Africa and its diaspora, by countless ways of resisting oppression.
The performance unfolds like a ritual of transformation. A ceremonial cleansing at the fountain, the rhythmic stamping of feet, the patting of the body – they all link grounding with activation. Gestures from protest marches, raised hands, the slow turning away from the audience: every movement evokes collective struggles without mimicking them. Instead, a poetic language of resistance emerges, an indirect narration of pain and hope.
When the three performers – Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald, Naledi Majola, and Sointu Pere Simphiwe Dana – begin to sing, „My mother was a kitchen girl / My father was a garden boy / That’s why I’m a communist…,” a legacy is invoked that is yet to be fulfilled: the voices of South African anti-apartheid songs, transposed into a present still marked by social inequalities.
Similar to the concept of Pachakutiy, Fitzgerald’s work shows that transformations are never linear. Upheavals (perceived by us as disruptions) occur gradually – through persistently repeated, embodied, and continually renewed actions, through rhythm, collective remembering, and symbolic reordering of space and objects. Both approaches illustrate that restoring an imagined balance or realizing utopian justice is an active collective process, encompassing both destruction and creative renewal.
Just as Fitzgerald’s work makes transformation tangible as a collective, physically enacted process, Josefina Cerda’s piece Feral raises fundamental questions of renewal and resistance – but from a completely different perspective. While Fitzgerald centers memory and communal action, Cerda treats her own female body as a site of power, desire, and liberation:
A children’s song floats through the air as the audience takes their seats, immediately countered by Cerda offering us a glass dildo: to kiss it, lick it, to suck it. What follows are festively excessive staged sexual acts, (self-)pleasure rituals, BDSM practices, inevitably making us, the audience, voyeurs.Is she playing the dominatrix (as an actress), or is she the dominatrix (as a sex worker)? And what does it mean that her performance constantly questions this either-or, this boundary between play and reality? Her commentary: “Art in general does not like sex, let alone pleasure” (Cerda is also a PhD art historian).
Josephina Cerda consciously positions herself as the object of desire – of our desire and her own. Objectification is presented not as a threat, but as a possibility for liberation: „Within pleasure lies the key for the body to be free,” she adds. In doing so, she shifts the discourse: the “object” is no longer understood as a passive, disempowered counterpart to an empowered subject, but as a mode of relational and power dynamics. In psychoanalytic tradition, the object (the „object of desire”) is considered a necessary projection surface for the life instincts: without an object, no desire; without desire, no self. Freud and later Lacan demonstrate that the subject is formed only in relation to the object – a relationship never entirely free of power and domination. Cerda’s performance makes this dynamic tangible by offering herself as an „object” while simultaneously subverting the destructive control of the subject. The problem does not lie in objectification itself, but in its co-optation by logics of possession – patriarchal, colonial, capitalist.
Here, the connection to Donna Haraway becomes apparent: in her Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway advocates for hybrid, posthuman subjectivities beyond fixed boundaries. The „cyborg“ is both human subject and inhuman object, machine and body, nature and culture. By consciously marking herself as an „object“, Cerda not only resists the binary logic (and its inherent discriminations) of active/passive, male/female, submission/domination, but also highlights the ambivalence of desire – the intertwining of love and hate, of destructive and caring impulses. She asks: Can the body itself become an acting agent – not as property, but as the site of sexual desire that acknowledges rather than suppresses pleasure and pain, and thereby enacts resistance?
Freud would say: in the act of object choice (which is always also a rediscovery) lies our access to pleasure. Haraway would add: this „object“ is never innocent, but always already entangled with power, technology, and history. Cerda brings both together, transforming the act of objectification into a sexual practice of agency.
Here the connection to the festival theme „Eros and Thanatos” becomes evident: „In these times of Pachakutiy, Eros shows us how to move with change, while Thanatos would have us crushed by it“ explains Martha Hincapié Charry. As Cerda’s staging of desire turns the body into an acting agent, Eros embodies the driving force of renewal – the power to transform and to defy every force of destruction.

Jette Büchsenschütz, Berlin