Our brandnew issue mono.kultur #45 with acclaimed writer and raconteur Richard Price is accompanied by stunning images by New York cab driver turned photographer Joseph Rodriguez, from a series called Spanish Harlem, documenting street life in the late 1980s with grit, intimacy and grain. As it happens, the series is currently on show at Galerie Bene Taschen in Cologne, featuring many images that did not make it into our issue. Needless to say, if in Cologne, we highly recommend to drop by.
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Phootgraphs from Spanish Harlem by Joseph Rodriguez

Last summer, YO!Sissy Queer Music Festival of Berlin hosted luscious personas such as Cakes da Killa, Crystal Waters, Peaches and more. Nowadays, organizers are running a Kickstarter campaign to bring bootyliciousness on stage again in 2016. Wouldn’t it be nice to sweat with Le1f or Dai Burger at SO36? Six more days to support…

This week’s recommendations are two events taking place in South London, both highlighting the work and music of producer Terre Thaemlitz aka DJ Sprinkles. Café OTO presents an evening of talk, video and audio with Thaemlitz, starting with a multi-media reading of “Naisho Wave Manifesto” (“Secrecy Wave Manifesto”), which Thaemlitz produced for the first issue of the Japanese culture journal Farben, released in June 2014. Thaemlitz discusses – as she did in the current mono.kultur #39 – the historic and strategic deployment of silence and closets. In particular, she addresses the problematic repercussions of the online digital distribution of critical cultural work, and demonstrates how the logic of hegemonic Internet platforms runs counter to the social dynamics of minor communities and subcultures. This will be followed by discussion with the audience. The evening will continue with Thaemlitz mixing a variety of ambient audio, video and conversation.

On Friday September 25th, Tief and NTS Radio will co-host a Beats in Space showcase in Peckham. DJ Sprinkles has been given the headline slot along Matt Karmil, Hesseltime and Tim Sweeney among others.

What more can we ask for?

Terre Thaemlitz: A Secret Wave Manifesto
24 September 2015 / 8pm
Café OTO
18–22 Ashwin street
London E8 3DL / Dalston

NTS Radio & Tief present: Beats In Space
25 September 2015 / 9pm
Bussey Building, The CLF Art Cafe
133 Rye Lane
London SE15 4ST / Peckham

If you are following our Instagram feed, you will have seen that we spent a week in Bogotá for a workshop at the impressive Utadeo university. Now that we’re slowly recovering from our Colombian hangover, it’s time to send a quick thank you towards the design department for inviting us in the first place, to the girls at our new favourite bookstore Nada for making it all happen, and to the students for introducing us to their personal Bogotá. If you would like to see the results of the workshop, they are up on their own Instagram account migracion.es.

As the holiday season is coming to an end, we are still looking for reasons to stay or even to go back to some of our favorite spots this summer. Cyprus for instance has not only a multilayered history, but also an eclectic contemporary art scene. Part of it is Neoterismoi Toumazou, a former novelty shop turned into an artist-run space in 2013 by artist and curator Maria Toumazou. Besides the curation of a diverse exhibition programme, she also produces artist editions and multiples. We are not surprised that the upcoming solo presentation of New York based artist Marysia Gacek looks just as promising!

Marysia Gacek’s work is known for its suggestive personal symbolism, using memory and arcane cultural references that assert the transcendent possibilities of the banal. Gacek works in a variety of materials from painting, clay, to textiles and video. By starting with a place, an image, a specific memory, or an object, she creates structures and narratives using personal symbolism and different modes of representation. For her exhibition, titled Same Goals, Gacek will display a collection of sculptures and assemblages testing the elusive nature of the forms depicted and the retraining of narratives. Elements of the exhibition allude to display strategies encountered during the artist’s stay in Cyprus.

Marysia Gacek – Same Goals
03 Septmeber – 25 September 2015
Neoterismoi Toumazou
69A Odos Aischylou
1011 Nicosia / Cyprus

Marsha P. Johnson (L) and Sylvia Rivera (R)

The German blockbuster-directer Roland Emmerich has just released a trailer for his new movie Stonewall, and it’s been already discussed controversially, particularly about its lack of authenticity. Just to quickly recap: The Stonewall Riots were a series of protests in 1969 against the police by the LGBT community in New York after a police raid in Greenwhich’s Stonewall Inn sparked a violent backlash. Stonewall is now referred to as the most significant event in the history of LGBT liberation. People critcize the movie as another example of whitewashing. Even though the film is billed as a “true story”, it appears to be told from the point of view of a corn-fed, white, cisgender boy called Danny who is kicked out of his house because of his homosexuality and retaliates by hitting the big city. In reality, Stonewall was started by black trans drag queen Marsha P. Johnson. While Marsha P. Johnson has been given a role in the Hollywood narrative, she is played by a cisgender male. She is only listed two places higher in the credits on imdb.com than “Woman with Poodle”, played by Nathaly Thibault. Fortunately people reacted promptly. Two days after the trailer’s release, a petition to boycott the movie popped up; by now it has been signed by over 23,000 people. Boycotters claimed that the film had “white-washed” and “cis-washed” history, erasing the significant contribution made by trans and queer women of colour and drag queens in the Stonewall uprising. The petition was created by Pat Cordova-Goff, a trans activist feminine person of colour. She wrote on the page:

“OUR HISTORY WILL NOT BE WHITE/CIS-WASHED. History classes throughout our nation have built a reputation of instructing young generations that white, straight, cis folks are the saviors and founders of this land. Wrong. We were taught that light-skinned people are the goal; the goal to assimilate to. Wrong. We were also rarely taught about queer history, but when we were, it probably revolved around white cis gay men. Wrong.”

Emmerich responded to the controversy stating, “I think we represented it very well[...] We have drag queens, lesbians, we have everything in the film because we wanted to portray a broader image of what ‘gay’ means.” His responds fail even more spectacularly when saying in a Facebook comment “We are all the same in our struggle for acceptance.”

No. We are not all equal in our struggle. People like Emmerich – cisgender, white people – are born into a world that gives them unqualified power. If you, Emmerich, cannot recognise that, you definitely should not be doing a movie about the most significant moments for transgender people of colour.

Marsha P. Johnson was a liberation activist. Despite Hollywood’s latest claims as in the film Stonewall(2015), the African American drag queen was the one who threw the first brick against the police in June, 1969. Literally, according to various sources, this trans woman of color ‘really started it’ − not a pretty clean white boy with luscious muscles.

‘When the construction of gender theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one’, writes Judith Butler in the bible of queer theory, Gender Trouble (p.9). Lately, the literature for queer theory started to expand. Besides our latest issue that we are proud of with queer producer Terre Thaemlitz a.k.a. Dj Sprinkles, even newspapers like The Guardian started to publish stories of queer personas; yet, the violence against LGBTIQ members is a crucial topic in the agenda. Through such publications, we observe that queer activism is painted with colors of drag. Mottos like ‘Pay it No Mind’, as the P. in Marsha’s name stands for, will conquer the world − reminiscent of the notion of queer utopia by theorist José Esteban Muñoz.

Terre Thaemlitz has commented on the changes to Japan’s controversial Fuueihou law via a statement on her website. The post responds to the “Declaration On the Future Of Japan’s Club Culture”, signed by 40 Japanese DJs on the same day that the 67-year-old law was officially changed by the Japanese government. She argues that it has “no purpose other than to comfort members of those reactionary political forces that have historically suppressed Japan’s club cultures,” and goes so far as to “pledge the future of Japan’s club cultures to the service of conservative social ideals.” She adds that “the larger issue at hand is not simply the ‘right to dance’, but the policing of our bodies and their movements”. The law was passed in 1948 in the post-war years to combat the lawlessness found in most dancing establishments. You can read the piece in full on her website Comatonse.

You can read an in-depth conversation with Thaemlitz on politics within the context of club culture in our current issue!

Whilst cycling in the city of Berlin, sometimes it is so shocking to observe how badly designed the city is. New condominiums or the so called ‘contemporary buildings’ of administrations are conquering our urban environment –the terrifying constructions spread around the city show that more is on the way.

Make City is a new festival on urban landscapes and architecture. In between the days 11^th-28^th June, the festival will take place with a program full of talks, exhibitions and happenings. Such a festival is important to contemplate on what is happening in/to our beloved city.

‘With the focus on making – a hands-on approach – to urban design, Make City brings together many urban acts of renegotiation and re-thinking of urban space. This is necessarily a collective act; it is about anticipating and involving the needs and desires of those that constitute the life of the city. Social networks, petition and protest, the disruptions that crack urban codes and regulations can open up city spaces to completely new forms of use. Urban Open Source is a key notion within the festival: a focus upon participation, upon making and thinking about the city differently – as a mutual project.’

See that logo six seconds into the clip (also see above)? Yap, mono’s riding again…

For the fifth consecutive year our favorite cycling crew Team #TORtOUR will be taking part in the infamous Berlin Velothon. Join the team on Sunday from 10:00AM @no74_berlin to cheer for all the riders taking part in this year’s race! #adidas #cycling With @lodownmag, @fvf @mykitaofficial @overkillshop @standertbicycles @qu0te @artoo871 and others…

Ein von Häberlein & Mauerer (@haebmau) gepostetes Video am 29. Mai 2015 um 8:06 Uhr