Biography
Louise Westerhout they/she
Is a crip, queer artist, curator, educator, activist whose areas of research are consciousness, posthumanism, Wicca, anti-speciesism, Crip and Mad Studies.
Louise ( and avatar Cyborg Witch) may not be separated from their praxis, as they are a living artefact and glitchy biochemical sculpture. They are emic and etic, one lives in a post-cancer survivor realism and the other, well, is it magic or post-traumatic dissociation?
Lorin Sookool is a South Afrikan contemporary artist with a foundation in dance. She has worked with multiple choreographers and residency bodies, with international performances in Mozambique, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada and the UK. Her artistic practice follows a process-based approach that is intuitive in nature and emergent in design, searching for the relationship between personal and collective themes; thereby becoming a reflective, reflexive, subject-centred practice. Sookool (SBYA 2023, Pina Bausch 2021) often explores complex South Afrikan socio-political themes, with a focus on situations of racial, gendered, systemic and institutionalized violence. She holds a Master of Arts (UCT, ICA) is a mother, seeker and amateur astrologist often gazing towards the planets in contemplation of their archetypal meaning, in relation to this complex and multi-dimensional planet.
https://studiosooks.my.canva.site/
Denise L.L. Onen is a South African-born Ugandan/Zambian sonic cultural practitioner working at the intersection of electroacoustic music, moving image, and immersive installation. Known for her work’s intensity and sonic eclecticism, she approaches sound-making as a form of audio alchemy, distilling lived experiences into uncanny and graceful expressions. Onen (DAAD Arts and Media ’23, Oram Award Nominee ’22) collaborates globally, crafting soundscapes for film, theatre, and art installations.
Synopsis
Lorin enters this collaboration with “she begins where she is”, a dance-based offering first shared early 2026 at Body Politic 16. The work asks how the body reorganises itself when inherited frameworks of value and labour lose resonance, forming part of her ongoing choreopolitical inquiry into value, labour and visibility. Focusing on the arms - instruments of care, work and holding - the research draws from everyday gestures with an intention to unravel productivity, revealing states of fatigue, care, gravity and release. The work treats the body as a site of thinking, where meaning emerges through sustained attention:. Rather than producing fixed forms, the practice allows movement to reorganise itself from within fatigue, asking what remains when the body begins again from where it is?.
Louise (and Cyborg Witch) share the 9th iteration of their research project unclear. Using Erickson hypnotherapy techniques of “enveloping”, the audience is invited to enter an immersive, multilayered story, exploring dislocation/refuge/home/magic in interwoven stories: 1) October/Beltane fable of the faery nation Thuatha De Danann forced out of Ancient Ireland by the Celts, 2) forced removal of Palestinians 3) pilgrimage of Louise’s stem cell transplant. Using creative captions and consent-based co-creation, witnesses are invited to share in a transgressive moment of collective effervescence as we commit our rage to the Beltane fire.
Denise (un)performs an externalisation of a ruptured internal world from Rooming with Shadows (first offered in 2022, reworked in 2025) through storytelling and song. Inspired by Resource Therapy (Emmerson, G), an evolution of Ego-State Therapy, these parts/characters/states are voiced, mirroring and reflecting the parts of ourselves we reject, deny, and exile. For Live Art, this unperformance takes place at the site of collapse: mental, emotional, physical - through songs of survivorship, refrains “long live the abusers,” and the sounding of her tired black bodies’ compulsory resilience.
Together we ask, “how would an (un)performance emerge if crip and queer artists had full autonomy and consent from witnesses and themselves: to pause, to stop, to opt out, and to feel that enough effort has happened?” This foundation insists that capacity is constantly changing and that the metrics of value are always evolving. This exploration of the micropolitics of care and hyperaccessibility decolonises hierarchies between performer and audience, listener and storyteller, the creator and the created.
Through this honest offering the triptyque/criptique weave together their/our lived experiences and critical inquiries into our exhausting and maddening realities.