Radical Tenderness

Franco Berardi, Breathing. Chaos and Poetry: „The bridge over the abyss of absence of meaning can take many forms: falling in love, tenderness, collective creation, hallucination, and movement. These forms give birth to the physical experience of meaning. Meaning is not a presence, but an experience.“ (2018, p. 145). Radical Tenderness marks Mascha Naumann‘s first solo show in Berlin after graduating last year from UdK, University of the Arts Berlin. On view will be new mixed media works exploring collaborative working processes between Mascha (an artist, clubworker and researcher) with xan egger and their own collective practice ( ) s-p-a-c-e, as well as with the photographer and artist Callum Leo Hughes and various other collaborators from Berlin’s club- and subcultures. The works focus on non-normative realities, class mobility and dissocial narratives throughout the subcultural practices of raving. The work process questions narratives of ownership, representation, accessibility, belonging and control and is based on collective relationships, trust and exploration. When transferred to a neoliberal mainstream, queer practice loses its social meaning, which oscillates between resistance and resilience. It shifts from the collective work of dissolving borders, binaries and biases to a performative act which not only reintroduces (hetero)normativity but also reproduces an aesthetic concept of differentiation. Performatively misused by a saturated middle class and an informed cultural elite as a means of distinction and devaluation through categorization and structuring, queerness today often presents itself as a form of strategic identity politics, becoming commodified and commercialized in the process. Its disruptive potential is intellectualized; as a concept rooted in straight thinking (Monique Wittig), it loses its agency/potency. Rendered immobile by systemic classification and entangled in structures of power, it ultimately proves harmless and ceases to cause any real disruption. Marginalization becomes an image—a form of symbolic capital that circulates solely within exclusive bubbles of distinction. Negative experiences are overwritten by positivist representation and claimed by subjects who never actually had them. The art industry, too, is rarely interested in anything other than integrating the „outside“—the foreign—into its own canon. It appropriates the subcultural and countercultural codes of outsiders and misfits,displaying and fetishizing them in an exploitative manner. Social practices of presence and connectedness—which reject visibility, attractiveness, affirmation, and the mechanisms of the attention economy—are transformed into empty signifiers within a discursive or economic space. The hegemonic art canon strips them of their countercultural and antisocial significance, shifts them into the realm of the symbolic (status, value), and subjugates divergent narratives. The exhibition title Radical Tenderness refers to a practice that needs the bodies to be present, and demands immediacy, movement and connection. The presence of bodies—both confidently physical and emotional in their deviant sociality—are perceived as caring, foreign elements within a repressive, suppressive and depressive society. The antirepresentative and invisible practice of Radical Tenderness requires care, vulnerability, accountability and empathy. Not to be mistaken for the neoliberal concept of subjectivity and self-care, or the hyper-representative notion of „the community“ as a vessel of social and cultural capital, this social practice unfolds in everyday acts of kinship and compassion. Emerging within transfeminist and decolonial activist communities and especially influenced and shaped by Dani d’Emilia and transnational collectives like La Pocha Nostra, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures and Mary Nardini Gang, the embodied practice of Radical Tenderness reminds us that we cannot find meaning in concepts, ideas and ideals but only in a shared presence, intersubjective relationships and the (dis)comfort of lived experiences. The exhibition challenges (hetero)normative power dynamics by re-directing discomfort and distress back towards the hegemonic society as well as emphasizing them within the queer communities. Re-appropriation and confrontation expose the gaze of superiority imposed on marginalized and create space for a disturbing and surprising experience of alienation. The involvement with the Other creates physical tension. Closeness can be hard to bear. Intimacy and comfort can only be experienced through personal and collective vulnerability, not through voluntary acts of setting boundaries and borders. Mary Nardini Gang, Criminal Intimacy: „We must make ourselves bodies without organs. Within each of us is contained a virtual pool of everything we are capable of becoming—our desires, affects, power, ways of acting, and infinite possibilities. To embody and activate these possibilities we must experiment with the ways our bodies act in conjunction with others.“ (2009). Sources: Berardi, Franco. 2018. Breathing: Chaos and Poetry. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Mary Nardini Gang. 2009. Criminal Intimacy. The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mary-nardini-gang-criminal-intimacy. Accessed on August 6, 2026.