ANXIETINA: A performance by Hannah Black and Bonaventure

A performance by Hannah Black and Bonaventure.

Set by Ebba Fransen Waldhor

By day, Anxietina is like anyone—working for money, caring for self and others, difficult circumstances, friends, social media, bank account, housework, groceries, moved or annoyed by strangers, confused by love—but at night and/or in moments of great danger she is transformed by the power of anxiety into ANXIETINA, a force for simultaneous good and evil, the vanishing-into-irrelevance and the emerging-into-history of human action and interaction. She uses her powers in the following ways, for example: to see backwards into the future, to feel the wind on the angel of history's very vulnerable back, to fight fascism through private secular prayer and to, in the privacy of her own mind, do battle with the demons of capitalism and their endless tendrils. She is superconnected in her superheroic mode to the lost voices of the ancestors who want revenge or just to finally get some sleep, and to the lost voices of the future, who are calling from the twisted strands of DNA: "Anxietina, please redeem us!" And in the morning back to her normal days. 

ANXIETINA is realised in words, textiles and music by writer and artist Hannah Black musician Bonaventure (Soraya Lutangu), and designer Ebba Fransen-Waldhor.  

Hannah Black is an artist and writer. Her work draws on feminist, communist and black radical theory, pop music, autobiographical fragments, hope and hopelessness.

Ebba Fransén Waldhör is a textile designer based in Berlin.

Bonaventure (Soraya Lutangu) uses music as an identity research tool along with practical and speculative initiatives to connect her African and European roots and investigate human boundaries.