Thinking through Touch
By melanie bonajo
This exhibition brings together three video works with scenography by Théo Demans, rooted in queer, feminist, anti-ableist, and anti-racist perspectives on the body, sex, and intimacy—arising from movements that center embodied knowledge, radical softness, and the right to pleasure beyond normativity.
The works respond to a world shaped by control, extraction, and exclusion—where power determines whose bodies are heard, held, or denied. They expose how systems condition our capacity for connection, and offer alternatives built on consent, care, and bodily autonomy. They ask what happens when we reclaim intimacy from systems that disconnect us—and decide who is protected, and who is not.
Across these works, intimacy is not privatized or pathologized.
Touch is resilience.
It’s a collective practice. It’s political.
When the Body Says Yes explores the intelligence of feelings and the healing potential of touch in a society marked by loneliness and performance. Through queer rituals of consent and pleasure, it creates space for softness, slowness, embodied listening, and mutual respect—especially for those pushed to the margins.
School of Lovers is a bold collaboration with performers with cognitive disabilities, reframing sex education as a shared, inclusive space. It questions who gets access to knowledge, whose desires are legitimized, and how we learn about bodies, gender, and boundaries when systems fail us.
TouchMETell engages children in conversations about physical autonomy, consent, and emotional awareness. In a culture that often avoids these topics or treats kids as passive, this work asserts that young people are fully capable of setting boundaries and understanding relational safety—if we take them seriously.
photo Peter Tijhuis