TRANS// CLASSLESS // QUEER // Performing Art and Activism in GHANA

In this episode of Fem*Poem, Romina Achatz is in conversation
with activist, multidisciplinary artist,  curator
and artistic director of perfocraZe International Artists
Residency (pIAR, Kumasi, Ghana), Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, also know
as CrazinisT artisT. They talk about Performances, Politics of
the Body, (Post)Colonialism, genderfluidity, human rights,
the advantage of living without a fixed identity, but rather
wanting to inventing oneself every day new, the Ghanaian LGBTQI+
Community and being publicly Trans in Ghana.


Va- Bene Elikem Fiatsi was born 1981 in Ho (Ghana) and
describes herself as a an avatar. Her* works investigate the
„culturality“ of gender stereotypes and sexual misrepresentation,
questioning the extreme quest for socio-cultural supremacy over
marginalized people, political injustice, violence,
vulnerabilities, human sense of mortality and objectification of
otherness. However, crazinisT uses the  body as a thought
provoking tool and material that confronts and exploits the
stereotypical aesthetics of marginalized citizens within
‘so-called’ civilized societies while exploring ‘rituals of
identity’, gender fluidity and the sense of belongingness.
CrazinisT has been actively engaged in contemporary practices
since 2012, traveling around the world, collaborating with
countless artists, fighting for human justice with her art and
everydaylife. She confronts not only the white supremacy with the
history of slavery, of Colonialism and it’s cultural impact-
including their ideas and invention of 2 genders.


Artist statement:


I believe performance is an embodiment of life, perhaps subtle
but intensive and ephemeral, which could provide an intimate
dialogue between the performer/s and the audience
(co-performers). It is important using performance as a potent
medium to re-examine our own colonial history from dynamic
experiences. However, the subject of Gender, sexuality, race and
being privileged  seem as residues from several colonial
past, experiences and [post-religious] debates for autonomy,
cultural authenticity and the politics of power.


As an artist whose work provoke thoughts and emotions on our own
sense of mortality and vulnerability, I engage the body into
performative works of art as set of rituals that assists in
evoking our continuity and discontinuity to the ‘Other’ and
‘Self’, trying to give new meanings to the concept ‘being’. While
exploring the politics of Identity, class, gender, sexuality,
human vulnerabilities, and our own sense of mortality, I present
my body as a violation, taboo and pleasurable object of violence
through simple but complexly layered rituals to my audience. In
my performances, silence and meditation is to seduce the audience
to participate in the habitual [shamanic] gestures by deeply
evoking emotional dialogues as process and product of performance
art, which at the same time collapses the walls between the
audience and the performer. To be a shaman in my rituals is a
metaphor of being an intermediate between the privileged and the
marginalised, speaking the language of silence as an artistic
responsibility to question the conscience of humanity.


However, my investigations as an activist and artist employ
experimental cross-disciplinary works, which cut across
performances, installations, videos, sounds and photography while
exploring the notions of [belongingness] and relationship between
the body and the world. I seek to provoke and question the
cultural frictions between gender performativity, race, sexual
prejudice and its misrepresentations


*“[sHe/it…]“ is my bio-political pronoun. Note: Any one/any
institution can ‚responsibly‘ use any pronoun of their preference
for me  otherwise just use „sHit“