Lecture in English language.

As Georges Didi-Huberman articulated it, artistic material that exists as an afterlife, having survived the end of the era that engendered it, thus “survives, as symptom and as phantom, its own death”. In this talk, I consider Gert as a living, embodied site for just such a phantasmatic afterlife of the witch. With the statement, “Ich bin eine Hexe”, Gert claimed the term – loaded with histories of persecution, colonial violence, and gendered alterity – as her own. So, what happens if we follow her lead, and look at Gert’s artistry – and grotesque, feminist performance more widely – as an afterlife of witchcraft?

Lindsey Drury is a Postdoc of Critical Dance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She researches the history of the body and critically addresses the history of dance anthropology, legal regulation of dance and performance, and the scientistic use of dance and the dancing body within colonial theories of civilizational progress.

This lecture is a part of the series Valeska Gert and her Afterlives. FU Berlin / AdK / DAAD: Celebrating 20 years of the Valeska Gert Professorship.