Exhausting Pleasure

Super Natural explores movement and the relationality of bodies, inviting a viewer for a guided meditation. Being initially conceived as a live performance, the film is based on the choreography of performers - some of them disabled. It investigates the potentiality of bodies, which merge with the material space, with landscapes, with living and non-living beings, inventing new forms of the possible. Throughout the film, viewers are guided by the voice whose exhausted language is pure sound translated into words in the subtitles. 

Extra Extra magazine invites six artists to reflect and respond on the question “What comforts you at night?”. The artists’ audio recording of their reflections as podcasts will be available to the “Fuck Healing (?): The Insomniac Dreamers” audience to listen via their personal phones whilst flaneuring through the night streets and parks of Amsterdam city. The audio content and the spatial engagement with the dark contours of the city invite new encounters to the environment and relations to comfort by night. With audio contributions form the artists Fiep van Bodegom, Dea Kulumbegashvili, Abdelkader Benali, Philip Huff, Natasha Hoare and Fatos Ustek. 

In the 1970s in Berlin was a special place... it had its own way of doing things, its own humor. It was the German capital of subversion, or maybe the European one. It was daring, abrasive, wild, but also inventing its own aesthetics and vision. There are very few authentic feature films that came out of that subculture that can be found today, but this is one of those forgotten gems.

It's not big on story... but hell, this was Berlin in the 70s, not Hollywood. A woman takes a plane to Berlin and goes on an endless drinking binge into oblivion. Is it a suicide mission? Or a total rejection in this world, leading to a kind of nirvana? Who knows, but as she drinks herself to the edge of existance she is certainly dressed to kill: in over-the-top costumes, pillbox hats, and tinfoil scarves. Flamboyant and crazy as hell, we follow her as she stumbles into a series of outrageously off-beat situations. But all the while, she remains a mystery, maybe even a myth. This eccentric film stars the legendary Tabea Blumenschein in the lead role, a woman who became a trendsetting icon of West Berlin's artistic nightlife in the 1980s. She designed her own outlandish costumes for the film, and director Ulrike Ottinger did the camerawork. But on the sideline we also have a wild list of cameos that make an appearance: Magdalena Montezuma, Nina Hagen (who sings a solo), Rosa von Praunheim, Eddie Constantine (who quotes Gertrude Stein) and fluxus artist Wolf Vostell. There are also a few Fassbinder regulars on hand such as Kurt Raab. Hell, even Martin Kippenberger is there somewhere.

The world has become very conservative since these times, will audiences today be able to handle this kind of unabashed freedom? Rainer Werner Fassbinder called it the second most beautiful movie in German cinema. A very rare screening of this gem.

From the bowels of Amsterdam, five separate boat tours expand on collective storytelling. With each tour an own performer from a specific narrative stream, they sail via stories through the city's canals. These canals become the places of excretion and disposal of hegemonic histories, purging the way for new realities and futurities to be conceived of from the collective imaginary. From a being in rather than a look upon, the performers and participating public exchange stories and thoughts woven from the immediate surroundings and relationality with one another. The boat functions as a vessel for reimagined futures, whereas the canals are the pathways of an anarchist world wherein the unvoiced become forefront and echoed. Narratively guided and skippered with the Amsterdam based artists Rocco Enzo Ter Haar, Ege Yılmaztürk, Eric Peter, Bethany Crawford and Bogna Bochinska. 

For the Fuck Healing event, we suggest the concept of Jazz Rave be central to the club night. It is the congregation between rave music and Jazz. Both ask for attention from the listener but in different aspects. Where the former seems more aimed at the element of dancing, the latter asks listeners to pay attention to intricate musical motifs. The congregation of these two is equally an experience of bodily movement as it is one that is aural. We think this suits the Deleuzian thinking Fuck Healing focuses on. 

Steppin' Into Tomorrow is a (live) music collective from Amsterdam operating on the cusp of new electronic and soulful music (from Dutch soil). Within the broad framework of Jazz; Broken-Beat, House, Jazz-Funk, forward-thinking Beats and everything yet unnamed, we tap into the thriving local underground scene that b(l)end the boundaries of these genres with DJ performances and live sets. 

Our ambition is two-fold. Firstly, reconverging staple elements of nightlife culture that were once in equilibrium, namely DJ culture, dance culture, and live music culture, balancing out our soulful sound with contemporary edgier and grittier sounds. Secondly, Steppin’ aims to bring together these elements locally in order to represent the soulful niche of the Netherlands and Belgium on a global scale.

We are here both for the casual music listener (who isn’t these days?), looking for a little more than algorithmically organized playlists, and for the seasoned record heads who look to dive deeper. We’re bringing together record collectors, DJs, producers, and bands to deliver a clear and accessible platform beyond the surface. Comb through the richness of contemporary soulful music has to offer. The articles, videos, mixes, radio shows, and informative podcasts work in synergy and are consistently presented, so you know what to expect. The events we host throughout the Netherlands are a reflection of our aim to connect music lovers.