"Don't extract it, don't consume it". Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies
Abstract
In light of the recent environmental devastation of bodies of water caused by the slow violence of extraction, recent (queer-)feminist, ecological and decolonial artistic perspectives such as Chilean-Mexican choreographer Amanda Piña frame water as a scarce, privatised and stolen resource and envision liquid understandings of an embodied being-in-the-world through what this paper calls liquid dramaturgies – a performative mode of engaging with the entangled relations between water, bodies, gender, extraction and contamination.
Full text
#8 2025 Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 1 JULIA SCHADE “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies In light of the recent environmental devastation of bodies of water caused by the slow violence of extraction, recent (queer-)feminist, ecological and decolonial artistic perspectives such as Chilean-Mexican choreographer Amanda Piña frame water as a scarce, privatised and stolen resource and envision liquid understandings of an embodied being-in-the-world through what this paper calls liquid dramaturgies – a performative mode of engaging with the entangled relations between water, bodies, gender, extraction and contamination. Extractivist Gaze Extraction Liquidity Bodies of Water Post-/Colonialism Cosmology Performative Strategies Fluid Aesthetics
Julia Schade “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 2 Thinking with Water Western modernity is obsessed with controlling, predicting, conquering, draining, channelling, damming and mining wetlands, rivers, lakes and oceans. In the name of progress, water technology and infrastructure is meant to discipline water bodies and their movement while human bodies are considered self-contained and separate from their environments. And yet, these bodies – human and more-than-human – leak, spill and contaminate, thereby unsettling the ontological division between human and ‘nature’ that sustains modernity’s claim to mastery.1 Countless examples, such as the Brumadinho dam disaster in 2019 or the current mercury pollution in the Amazon due to illegal gold mining, not only reveal the devastating consequences of extractivist capitalism on ecosystems and communities but also expose the porous boundaries between human and more-than-human life. Against this backdrop this essay argues that it is important to not only think about water as a resource but as a relational scene of liquid epistemologies which offer embodied modes of being-in-the-world and unsettle anthropocentric and dispossessive paradigms. From my partial perspective as a white German performance scholar, who has been educated in the Global North where water scarcity and contamination have long been ignorantly regarded as a rather abstract concern, I observe how many contemporary (queer-)feminist artistic positions from Abya Yala – the Indigenous pre-Colombian term for the Americas – have been turning towards water and water-relations, highlighting the consequences of extraction2 and the colonial legacies inscribed within landscapes. These practices frequently draw attention to how environmental devastation and gendered violence are co-constituted, revealing the intersections between ecological, social and epistemic forms of dispossession. Recent prominent examples from the visual arts, to only name a few, include the long-term multimedia project Be Dammed3 (2012–ongoing) by Colombian and Los Angeles-based artist Carolina Caycedo which follows the socioenvironmental consequences of hydroelectric dams and other large-scale infrastructure developments on local communities and ecosystems in Colombia.4 Mapuche nonbinary artist Seba Calfuqueo’s video work KOWKÜLEN (Liquid Being, 2020)5 intertwines the topic of water commodification in Chile with that of gender fluidity, drawing on Mapuche ontologies while the artist’s naked body performs in the Cautín River.6 Another example which also confronts the struggle for water justice in Chile is Patricia Domínguez’s La balada de las sirenas secas (2020).7 The installation creates a futuristic dystopian fantasy in which hybrid beings perform rituals in the desert to bring back the hydrocommons. In the context of theatre and the performing arts, Colectivo Yama – a multidisciplinary, self-managed collective based in Ecuador – recently staged the decolonised opera Indian Queens (2024) in cooperation with Theater Aachen. The work addresses the struggle of women activists, called Guardians of the Water,8 in Peru and Ecuador, who fight to protect their
Julia Schade “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 3 waters and environment, whilst drawing on the colonial semi-opera The Indian Queen by Henry Purcell from 1665. What these very different examples share is a certain approach towards water and extractivism by relying on activist, Indigenous or pre-colonial knowledge. Instead of claiming a universal meta-perspective, they rather include situated and relational perspectives from affected, often Indigenous, local communities, foregrounding alternative ontologies of coexistence and reciprocity. Secondly, they show how violence against bodies of water will eventually inscribe itself onto human bodies – primarily those of society’s most disadvantaged and weakest members, such as womxn in local communities. In the following, I focus on one performance artist in particular: the Viennabased Chilean-Mexican choreographer Amanda Piña. As I will show, Piña’s works are not only situated within this critical decolonial ecological discourse on human–water relations, but they also question colonial extractivist modes of thinking. At the same time, they inaugurate different understandings of an embodied being-in-the-world through what I call liquid dramaturgies – a performative mode of engaging with the entangled relations between water, bodies, gender, extraction and contamination. I am particularly interested in three interconnected dimensions: first, in how Piña’s works frame water as a scarce, privatised and stolen resource, increasingly threatened by mining and environmental degradation; second, how they choreograph and perform human and more-than human body-water relationality; and third, how her liquid dramaturgies might offer an alternative epistemic and aesthetic mode – one that thinks with water, embracing its fluidity as a way of unsettling and dissolving dominant Western, extractivist and anthropocentric paradigms. “The task is not to think about water but with it”, emphasise Liliana Gómez and Lisa Blackmore who refer to liquid ecologies as “liquefied landscapes” which are “host to turbid histories of capital flows, philosophical currents, aesthetic traditions and residual traumas that connect distinct spaces, times and bodies.”9 It is thus not just a matter of understanding water as an object of artistic and performative research; rather, thinking with water is also a central methodological demand for thinking differently about bodies, environments and their boundaries in theory and performance. Following Blackmore and Gómez, I understand liquid dramaturgies as a performative critical ecological perspective on water as resource, epistemology and metaphor. Follow the Water: Mountain in Resistance Since 2014, Amanda Piña has been pursuing a long-term research project entitled Endangered Human Movements, which deals with movement practices that have long been dismissed as ‘primitive’ or ‘folklore’ in modernity.10 In collaboration with local communities, scholars and activists, Piña develops
Julia Schade “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 4 performances, lectures, workshops, installations and an online archive which she considers a “rehearsal of an Ecology of forms of knowing” to create a “place for counterand alter-worlds of sensing and meaning to exist and to be practiced collectively”.11 In recent years, she has increasingly turned her attention to the topics of extractivism and decolonial ecology; her latest work To Bloom () Practices de Florecimiento (2024) envisions the ocean as a living archive of ancestral knowledge. In the following, I refer to two of Piña’s recent works: Mountains in Resistance and Climatic Dances, which, as I will argue, create liquid dramaturgies that experiment with Amerindian12 epistemologies and ontologies. They ask what a more liquid understanding of environment might be – one which dissolves modern colonial ontological divisions of bodies, humans, non-humans and nature. FIG. 1 Amanda Piña, Mountains in Resistance, Endangered Human Movements Vol. 5 , 2021, the mountain walk in the Austrian Alps is led by shaman (mara’akame) Juan José Luis ‘Katira’ Ramírez. Mountains in Resistance13 is a site-specific artistic mountain walk that exists in two versions – one developed in 2022 for the Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile and the mountains in El Arrayán, Chile, and one in 2021 for Tanzquartier Wien. The Vienna version begins with a bus ride into the mountains to Kaiserbrunn Rax Schneeberg. During the journey, participants listen to audio tracks about the historical background of Vienna's first drinking water pipeline and about the struggle of water democratisation in the 19th century. The audio is narrated by the artist and her collaborators,14 who reflect on the privilege of clean drinking water from their Latin American perspective and discuss water commodification in Chile.15
Julia Schade “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 5 FIG. 2 Amanda Piña, Mountains in Resistance, Endangered Human Movements Vol. 5 , 2022. The mountain walk in El Arrayán, Chile. The artistic mountain walk leads visitors slowly along a forest path, accompanied by soundtracks from the Peruvian Amazon, El Nayar in presentday Mexico and the Sápmi region in Scandinavia. The walk is led by Juan José Luis ‘Katira’ Ramírez, who has been a close collaborator of Piña for many years. He is dressed in colourful clothing and a distinctive plumed hat. Besides being a shaman or mara’akame of the Wixarika nation (Huichol) in Mexico, he has also been an activist and governor of his community of La Laguna in Mezquitic Jalisco in the Western Sierra Madre, which is threatened by draught and, more recently, by a Canadian mining company digging for ore on their land. On the riverbed in the Austrian Alps, the audience observes the movement of five dancers, forming fluid flower-like structures. Later, a figure in a blue chiffon dress appears in the middle of the river, her face covered by a mask, her long train moving in the current. The walk ends with a ritual led by the shaman in a cave at the source of Vienna’s drinking water. FIG. 3 Amanda Piña, Mountains in Resistance, Endangered Human Movements Vol. 5 , 2021, during the Austrian version of the artistic mountain walk the participants observe how a figure dressed in a blue chiffon dress appears in the river. FIG. 4 Amanda Piña, Mountains in Resistance, Endangered Human Movements Vol. 5 , 2021, five dancers perform fluid flower-like structures along the riverbed.
Julia Schade “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 6 FIG. 5 Amanda Piña, Mountains in Resistance, Endangered Human Movements Vol. 5 , 2021, the mountain walk in the version for Tanzquartier Wien ends in a cave at the source of Vienna’s drinking water. Although the visitors are in the foothills of the Austrian Alps and the show is ostensibly about Vienna’s drinking water supply, Piña interweaves this local water story with that of the Wixarika community in present-day, as well as other communities in Chile impacted by mining extractivism. The practice of the shaman, the ritual and the choreographies in and around the river refer to other epistemologies in which water is not just a resource, but a natural and sacred part of the environment and human and more-than-human structures. As in Climatic Dances, which I will come to in the second part of this article, Piña entangles these epistemologies with a practice of embodiment which does not directly ‘translate’ Indigenous water relations into ‘Western concepts’ but plays with the ambivalence of liquifying the latter. Her artistic approach is characterised by careful attention towards modes of thinking and being which undermine the “ontological division”16 between human and non-human, thereby stressing responsibility, care and community. To further understand what I mean by liquid dramaturgies in this context, I need to zoom out a bit to briefly outline this discursive field of liquidity. Liquid Ecologies: Promises and Discontents Thinking about water, its ecologies, relationalities, embodiments, politics and infrastructures has become a popular subject throughout the humanities, following the so-called liquid turn.17 Whether summarised as “blue humanities”18, “wet ontologies”19 or “new sea ontologies”,20 the discursive field of critical environmentally informed thinking about water, rivers and lakes brings together various discourses around fluidity, liquidity, environments, more-than-human relationalities, non-Eurocentric epistemologies, diasporic imaginaries, neo-colonial extractivism and toxic legacies of the “Racial Capitalocene”.21
Julia Schade “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 7 As heterogeneous as these approaches may be, they mostly share the assumption that dealing with water demands other-than-land-based modes of knowledge, inaugurating a thinking beyond a “terrestrial bias”.22 Put differently, this could be understood as facing “Life in Capitalist Ruins”,23 where contaminated residues of our extractivist age and its colonial afterlife accumulate and inscribe themselves in landscapes, human and more-thanhuman bodies, rivers, wetlands, lakes and oceans. It is thus important to envision and practice relational, non-extractive ways of thinking and being. Within the colonial extractivist paradigm, the containment, pollution and exploitation of bodies of water have been legitimised through the idea of aqua nullius – empty, uninhabited spaces available for appropriation.24 Modernity’s triumph of technological mastery over nature is reliant on stripping nature of its embedded social relations, rendering it as a neutral “raw material of techne”, as Anna Tsing puts it.25 Following this logic, the condition for colonial land taking and subjugation of its population was based on the assumption of terra nullius – land imagined as uninhabited, ready to be conquered and exploited for its natural resources.26 In short: terra nullius implies a supposedly neutral “nature without entangling claims” in which “native entanglements, human and not human, must be extinguished.”27 Rivers, lakes and oceans also fall victim to this logic – aqua nullius treats bodies of water as simple resources which are destined to be subjugated, navigated, explored, channelled, drained and diverted. To move towards a decentralisation of Western thought patterns with and through water, following more relational approaches, many (queer-)feminist, ecological and decolonial perspectives envision liquid ecologies. As Lisa Blackmore writes, “In a liquid ecological perspective”, bodies of water are “mingling of epistemologies where the human and non-human converge amid climatic, infrastructural, economic, socio-political, and cultural forces in constant flux.”28 These perspectives therefore focus more strongly on the materiality of waters themselves, their more-than-human components and colonial implications, as well as on the metaphorical and epistemological potential of liquidity. Thinking about liquid ecologies also concerns the conditions and dependencies under which we are practicing and producing knowledge on water–body relations. In doing so, it advocates for a liquefaction – or aquatisation – of binary ways of thinking, as well as for an eco-feminist reimagining and fabulation of potential futures. These perspectives align with what Astrida Neimanis calls the “posthumanist feminist aqueous imaginary”,29 which envisions “more-than-human hydrocommons”,30 and conjures up “transcorporeality at sea”.31 It is important to mention that this understanding stands in contrast to capitalist and digital metaphors of flow and liquidity.32 As liquidity also features in discussions about capitalist global money and data flows, it can easily become “an updated version of colonial conception of the world”33 and a “frictionless and resistance-free material phenomenon”.34 A feminist,
Julia Schade “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 8 decolonial and ecological understanding of liquidity, however, firmly rejects this conception of liquidity as an abstract and apolitical metaphor, emphasising instead the aspects of responsibility and care within liquid ecologies. They are rather thus concerned with human responsibilities within a “more-than-human aqueous ecology – that is, an ecology in which humans and other bodies of water (animal, vegetable, meteorological, geophysical) are always already implicated, as lively agents, in one another’s well-being”35, as Neimanis emphasises. But what exactly are the implications of ‘liquidity’ within the humanities and how do liquid ecologies affect the way we can think about water–body relations within performance? To understand why there is a necessity to ‘liquefy’ Western thinking, we need to go deeper into Neimanis’s concept of hydrofeminism.36 No Leaking, Flowing or Dripping: Liquefying Western Subjects In what Neimanis famously calls hydrofeminism, she offers a critical rereading of the Western notion of the subject and the body through the element of water. The much-quoted passage reads as follows: “We are all bodies of water. To think embodiment as watery belies the understanding of bodies that we have inherited from the dominant Western metaphysical tradition.”37 I would like to pause here for a moment to reflect on this quote. It becomes clear that the “dominant Western metaphysical tradition” is not only based on binary thinking (human/nature, man/woman etc.) but also relies heavily on a self-governing subject which is understood as hermetically sealed off from its environment. In other words: it does not leak, flow or drip, and is therefore, in a sense, dried up. In this context, anything which does not correspond to this dry ideal is usually described as feminine – the leaky,38 abject,39 permeable, menstruating, uncontrollable – qualities which threaten the idea of a self-contained, selfpossessed body. Neimanis therefore lets us ask: What if we were to dismantle the dry Western anthropocentric theory with its own tools – by thinking with the fluid instead of draining our theory? Following this thought, she coins the term hydrocommons to describe her relational, liquid way of understanding human and more-than-human bodies and environments.40 Hydrofeminism thus offers an initial approach to understanding bodies and their environments no longer as separate entities, but as relational and interdependent. In recent years, (queer-)feminist approaches in the arts refer prominently to the concept of hydrocommons. While liquidity is mostly understood as the blurring of binary gender boundaries,41 others address the entanglement of gender and coloniality, which I will come to later.
Julia Schade “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 9 Despite the attractiveness of Neimanis’s prominent liquefaction hypothesis that “we are all bodies of water”, we need to be aware of its potential romanticisation. If interpreted superficially, it may suggest a complete dissolution of bodily boundaries and a universalising confluence that risks overlooking power asymmetries.42 For example, certain bodies, due to a specific history of violence, dehumanisation and racialisation, are exclusively associated with toxic water or no water at all. In the discussion about liquidity, ecology, and liquid dramaturgies in particular, it is therefore important to consider the certain “potential violence” of “any kind of unified ‘we’”.43 Central here is an approach that explicitly includes decolonial ecologies and asks what epistemic implications extractivism have. A fundamental part to a decolonial feminist liquid ecology is not only a “commitment to social justice for both human and more-than-human bodies,” but also “a rejection of epistemological mastery”.44 Who Is This Watery ‘We’? Decolonial Ecologies and Extractive Regimes French-Caribbean scholar Malcom Ferdinand coined the term decolonial ecology45 to emphasise the necessity of including relationships of racial and colonial domination within ecological discourse – perspectives often excluded from the mostly white ecological ‘we’.46 Ferdinand calls this blind spot – which has always considered environmental and ecological issues separately from critical aspects of power structures – the “colonial and ecological double fracture of modernity”.47 Colonisation and enslavement are thus inextricably linked to a logic of extraction in modernity that not only understands ‘nature’ as a mere resource to be drained and dehumanises people into exploitable commodities, but also carries far-reaching epistemic implications – heavily influencing the way knowledge is produced and how subjects, bodies and environments are perceived. In her book Extractive Zones, Macarena Gómez-Barris clearly shows how extractivism – as the paradigm of Western modernity – inscribes itself as an “extractive gaze” within dispositifs (or apparatuses) of vision and knowledge: “The Extractive view sees territories as commodities, rendering land as for the taking, while also devalorizing the hidden worlds that form the nexus of human and nonhuman multiplicity.”48 This extractive view, which is similar to the colonial gaze, subjects land and knowledge to a logic of ownership and exploitation, thereby turning people, animals and landscapes into individual entities regardless of their relation. In turn they become categorisable, predictable and thus exploitable. Neimanis’s liquefaction hypothesis, quoted before, can thus be supplemented as follows: The idea of this dry, self-contained subject is accompanied by a logic of ownership and possession that manifests in visual regimes – meaning, in the way we visually access our surroundings – ‘draining’ them of any relations, so to speak, in order to appropriate them. Liquid ecologies, including bodies of
Julia Schade “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 16 23 Tsing 2015. 24 Cf. DeLoughrey 2020, p. 133. 25 Tsing 2012, p. 513. 26 Brenna Bhandar has emphasised the entanglement of colonialism, racial regimes of ownership and private property law. The latter legitimised the assertion of control over Indigenous territory whilst legally transforming it into a commodity. Bhandar 2018, pp. 1–33. 27 Tsing 2012, p. 513. 28 Blackmore 2020, p. 30. 29 Neimanis 2014, p. 7. 30 Neimanis 2009, pp. 161–182. 31 Alaimo 2012. 32 For a critical perspective on the use of the concepts of liquidity, flow and circulation as common descriptions of digital cultures, as well as of flow as an epistemic resource, see Denecke/Kuhn/Stürmer 2022. 33 Leslie 2022, p. 166. 34 Nakas 2022, p. 20. 35 Neimanis 2014, p. 6. 36 Neimanis 2012. 37 Ibid., p. 85. 38 Schmedes 2022. 39 Kristeva 1982. 40 Neimanis 2009. 41 One such example is the performance Wetland by Katharina Senzenberger which uses the concept of hydrocommons to blur the boundaries of gender binaries. Wetland premiered on the 11th May 2023 as a co-production by tanzhaus nrw and Tanzfaktur Cologne. 42 Neimanis herself explicitly cautions against such reductive readings. She emphasises instead that “water is always sometime, someplace, somewhere”, underscoring the situated, contingent nature of watery entanglements. Neimanis 2012, p. 90. 43 Neimanis 2023, p. 19. She discusses the challenges of a “watery we” with regard to intersectional feminist theory and hydrofeminist approaches in particular. Sara Ahmed puts it this way: “Feminist histories are histories of the difficulty of that ‘we’.” Ahmed 2017, p. 2. 44 Neimanis 2014, p. 6. 45 Ferdinand 2021. 46 This critique has been formulated in Vergès 2017; Yusoff 2018; Yusoff 2024. 47 Ferdinand 2021, p. 3. 48 Gómez-Barris 2017, p. 5. 49 Media scholars have highlighted how the ocean has systematically been contained by land-based technology, terrestrialising it. See Jue 2020; Schade 2025. 50 Gómez-Barris 2021, pp. 1. 51 Ibid., p. xiv. 52 Gómez-Barris 2017, p. xiv. See also Beckmann/Löffler 2025. 53 Cf. Haraway 1988, pp. 583–584. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., p. 586. 56 Piña refers to the anthropologist Alessandro Questa. Piña 2020b. 57 de la Cadena 2015, p. 24. 58 Ibid., p. xxiii. 59 Ibid., p. 25. 60 Ibid., original italics. 61 de la Cadena 2024. 62 de la Cadena 2015, p. xxv, original italics. 63 Neimanis 2014, p. 6. 64 Nixon 2013. 65 Liboiron 2020, p. 95. 66 Liboiron describes how the usual academic way to read and write is an extractive mode. Ibid. 67 Nakas 2022, p. 20. 68 de la Cadena 2025, p. 218. De la Cadena refers to Anna L. Tsing’s notion of friction. Tsing 2015. 69 Piña reclaims the term mestizo from its colonial and racist genealogy, aligning it instead with Gloria Anzaldúa’s idea of “the new mestiza” – a hybrid consciousness arising from the negotiation of multiple cultural identities, premised upon a decolonisation of subjectivity and ways of knowing. See Anzaldúa 1987 and Piña 2023, p. 69. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, however, proposes the Quechua concept chi’ixi as a critical alternative to the homogenising logic of mestizaje. See Rivera Cusicanqui 2018. 70 Piña in conversation with the author on 08/08/2025. 71 de la Cadena 2015, p. xxv. 72 Murphy 2017, p. 497. CREDITS Fig. 1, 3–5: Courtesy of Amanda Piña and Tanzquartier Wien, Austria.
Julia Schade “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 17 Fig. 2: Courtesy of Amanda Piña and GAM Santiago de Chile, El Arrayán, Chile. Fig. 6: Courtesy of Amanda Piña and GAM Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile, Chile. Fig. 7: Courtesy of Amanda Piña and DeSingel Antwerpen, Belgium. BIBLIOGRAPHY Sara Ahmed: Living a Feminist Life . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Stacy Alaimo: “States of Suspension: Trans-Corporeality at Sea.” In: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment , vol. 19, no. 3, December 2012, p. 476–493, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/iss068. Jens Andermann: Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023. Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. 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Julia Schade “Don’t extract it, don’t consume it”. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 19 Kathryn Yusoff: A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. —: Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478059288. AUTHOR Julia Schade is Junior Professor of Performance Research at the Goethe University Frankfurt. She was a Visiting PhD Researcher at Brown University and a Postdoc in the DFG training group Documentary Practices at the Ruhr University Bochum. Her dissertation, Unzeit. Widerständige Zeitlichkeiten in Performance, Kunst, Theorie (Berlin: Neofelis, 2024), won the WISAG Prize 2021. Her research focuses on performance and theory in the afterlives of colonialism and critical ecology. Her current project explores liquid dramaturgies and oceanic fabulations . She is a member of the DFG research network Flows. Schmiermittel der Theoriebildung . Recent publications include: “What Does It Take to Go Deep? The Oceanic and Its Conceptual Displacements,” in Sub(e)merging: Experiences, Practices and Politics from Below (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2025); and “Inhaling the Other: Pneumatic Intimacies and the Racialization of Breath,” in Performance Research (vol. 29, no. 5, 2025).