[Launch] Crossings with Liz Rosenfeld

Welcome to the launch of Crossings: creative ecologies of cruising by João Florêncio and Liz Rosenfeld. Hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir Crossings takes queer sex practices and cultures seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. On the occasion of the launch Liz Rosenfeld will screen a series of short films – Tremble (2021), Liz/James/StillHoles (2017) and Daisy Chain (2014) – made on their experience of cruising. 

Schedule
19:00 Liz Rosenfeld Reading and Screening
20:00 Conversation Riv Rosenfeld and Chloe Chignell 

About Crossings
A creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences, Crossings takes queer sex practices and cultures seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. The result is an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir. Here, the voices of each author, merged together in one, invite the reader to inhabit the erotic spacetime between self and other, the familiar and the strange, desire and pleasure, climax and release. That is, the spaces and temporalities of cruising itself.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of cruising. While the term was used by men seeking casual encounters with other men in the parks and streets of New York City as early as the 1920s, historical records show the practice is much older. Cruising has existed for as long as anyone outside the dominant sex and gender systems has sought sexual encounters outside of sanctioned norms. This book offers a serious exploration of queer sex and sex cultures, exploring cruising as a mode of thinking with the body and communicating through sexuality.

Tremble (2021, 6:26)
lutter. Shutter. Quiver. Throb. Vibrations oscillate between all the holes and all the folds. Exposed under full house lights, a lone body trembles with the architecture of an empty darkroom. Closed due to COVID-19, in the darkroom of one of Berlin’s oldest gay cruising bars, through tableaus of nuanced movement, the artist's body proposes an ambiguous future towards abundance and desire. 

Liz/James/StillHoles (2017, 8:13)
An exploration of cruising glory holes, the clash between queer politics and queer desire, feminism, and general queer frustration. 

Daisy Chain (2014, 4:51)
An experimental meditation on the materiality of flesh, holes and the binary gendering of circle jerk.

About Liz Rosenfeld
Liz Rosenfeld is a Berlin/ London based interdisciplinary artist and educator  who works with performance,moving images, drawing and experimental writing practices. Liz addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, past and future histories in regard to the ways in which memory is queered. Liz's work deals with flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focussing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, edging questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space. Embracing an auto- theoretical style, Liz's writing is rooted in questions that contend with how queer ontologies are grounded in variant hypocritical desire(s.) Liz has shown work Liz’s films and performances have shown in international museums and venues including The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, The Forum Expanded Program of the 2022 Berlinale, Antifestval, Bärenzwinger Berlin, Mousonturm, Tanzhaus nrw, Kampnagel, 2019 Bergen Assembly,Berlinischer Galerie, Mapa Teatro, Sophiensæle, The Hebbel am Ufer Theatre, The Gorki Theater, Arts Admin, Galerie Emanuel Layr, The Tate Modern, The Hammer Museum, The Leslie Lohman Museum, The Barbican Centre, The CAC- Glasgow, Tramway, The Stedelijk Museum, The C/O Gallery, and The Deutsches Historisches Museum. Liz’s short films are represented by Video Data Bank and LUX Moving Image. Liz received an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, followed by an MA from The Department of Performance Studies at New York University in 2007.