Workshop: Claire Lefèvre, Soft Brunch: A Horizontal Gathering, 2025

In the organizer's words:

Claire Lefèvres workshop as part of the exhibition soft intentions is an invitation to lie down, relax your jaw and learn about care work from a queer feminist perspective. There will be food, coffee and books and essays by Sophie Lewis, The Care Collective, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasihna. Inspired by Claire's ongoing practice as a choreographer and performance doula, this gathering encourages that we can move away from exploitative capitalist structures and towards networked and sustainable practices by placing care at the center of our work processes. The workshop will include readings, writing exercises, group discussions and somatic work. We will also practice hands-on care by resting, painting our nails, and gently reading to each other.

Target group: Everbody welcome!

Drinks / snacks: water, coffee, pastries, fruit, vegetables, rice crackers, dips

Recommended donation: 5-15 euros (not obligatory)

Registration by 16.07.2025 at the latest to events@andshewaslikebam.de

Claire Lefèvre (she/her) is a femme choreographer, sleepless writer and reality TV enthusiast currently living in Vienna. She likes to think of herself as a host, inviting audiences and collaborators into kitschy landscapes where politics and poetry are gently interwoven. From 2019 to 2022, she explored the concept of radical softness as a choreographic technique, making hypersensitivity the method, theme and lens through which her artistic work should be imagined. Her last piece LOIE (is a fire that cannot be extinguished) (2024) dealt with messy dance histories and embodied queer archives. Alongside her choreography, Claire is currently exploring the archetype and working practices of a performance doula - a role developed to make care work visible in the context of performance. She also teaches and writes: Her work with text ranges from poetry to funding applications and sometimes flirts with performance criticism, stand-up comedy or feminist theory. Sometimes she also works as a ghostwriter, but mainly because of the ghostly allure of the job title.

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The exhibition soft intentions is about softness in all its facets: about soft, textile materials, but also about physicality, emotionality, vulnerability, emotional labor and care work. A soft experiment, a space for action guided by tenderness, closeness and attentive interaction. An invitation to explore the extent to which softness can also be resistant.

The exhibition builds on the artistic work We in the Cave by Cologne-based artist Sophia Schach in the cave. Wir in der Höhle is not only a walk-in installation, but also a stage for an extensive, interdisciplinary program with performances, workshops, concerts and reading sessions.

The exhibition is curated by Amelie Gappa as part of the 10th anniversary of the intersectional-feminist initiative And She Was Like: BÄM!