You’re Seeping Into My Bloodstream 2023-24 (KW Berlin, E-Werk Luckenwald)

„you’re seeping into my bloodstream“ is a poetry reading, performative lecture and auto-theoretical essay on love ruled by disease, examining its sick and vampiric tendencies for subsistence. This performance delves into Youden’s continued exploration of chronic illness as near-death experience, or a “time of ‘non-death’”. As a term coined by Gruppo Di Nun in Revolutionary Demonology, “time of ‘non-death’ speaks of the mysterious presence of absence, a world populated by impersonal forces and entities, that although not alive, cannot be called dead”. For Youden, the term becomes inextricably intertwined with the canon of lesbian vampire literature and its metaphors for disability, disease and queer Crip lust. In this realm of the undead, the terrifying angels of Rainer Maria Rilke co-exist with tragic heroines from meta-fictional K-dramas, relive 2015 psycho-thriller bimbo comedies, and sit through many a BPD girl dinner. Interwoven with Youden’s personal accounts of illness, limerence and immortal deviance, she threads together cross-generational fact and fiction, relating to forms of Crip collectivity and its underworld networks of care.

„you’re seeping into my bloodstream“ was performed at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in December 2023. It will be performed at E-Werk Luckenwald as part of The Drop Out: Tell Them I Said No on May 2nd 2024.