Expanding aesthetics of complexity through the alchemy of BDSM: a conversational drift

With its xploratory search at the threshold of arts, sexuality, body-mind practices and BDSM, what aesthetic and ethical learning processes does Schwelle7 unfold? In a conversation with Felix Ruckert and with the participants at Xplore 2015, Sacha Kagan aims to tease out some of the potential insights that emerge from an expanded practice of corporeal learning. The conversation, which will start as a dialogue with Felix Ruckert, will then branch out as a metalogue with all participants, alternating plenary and smaller group conversations. We welcome you to share your thoughts, questions and experience about ethical, aesthetic, cultural and political insights you may have gained through BDSM-related practice. This session will constitute a moment for reflection. We will xplore together how the alchemical processes of BDSM play & performance, especially when they encounter other creative and embodied practices, may expand our understanding of self and society. Among the issues and theoretical perspectives we may approach are: power relations, political spaces, social roles, embodied knowing, the remapping of the sexual body (after Foucault), the qualities of ambivalence and ambiguity in transmuting dichotomies into dia-logical unities (after Morin),the virtues of border-crossing and border-expanding (BDSM as queering), and the messy pathways of human resilience.