UBIK Performance Night w/ Salon of Queer Indoctrinations
St.Elio’s Salon of Queer Indoctrinations is a series of performance nights that aim to generate communal, multi-perspective knowledge and awareness by collectively exploring different social concepts, relevant to queer thought.
The fifth edition’s theme is “Tenderness." The night will include a live performance, a workshop, and a screening from different artists, whose work resonates with the theme. A group discussion between everyone present will follow.
We want to make this event as easy to access as possible. If you can’t afford the full price of the ticket, send an email to pr@worm.org to receive a discount code. Limited reduced price tickets available.
ARTISTS PRESENTING:
Can Bora
Instagram: @canbora.berika
Can Bora is a queer multimedia artist with a background in theatre, contemporary dance, performance, and somatic practices. His work focuses on connectivity – with self, human, nonhuman, and inhuman bodies – and treats the sensing body as a tool for self-discovery and self-emancipation.
He is the founder of HEALIVE., a studio in Amsterdam dedicated to somatic and performance practices. The Crossing is an ongoing research into the “speculation of touch,” combining performance practices, somatic psychology, future studies, and new materialism.
Since 2021, The Crossing has been presented in Arnhem, Amsterdam OT301, Istanbul Pure.Space, online, and in April 2026 at Amsterdam Barespace with BSAK. For WORM, Can reshapes the work around tenderness. Alongside The Crossing, Can develops performance projects like Henna Night Reimagined and Dream Bazaar, presented across Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Nijmegen over the past three years.
ari sinn
Instagram: @arionomous
ari sinn (they/them) is a multidimensional artist, space holder, listener, and activist whose work aims to centre collective care, exploring ways of connection and belonging through collaborative, interactive embodied practices. As a crip and queer bodymind, ari’s performances and interactive installations invite to tune into your body and (re)connect with yourselves, each other and the land in a world shaped by neoliberal and colonial individualism. They foster somatic experiences through gentle interactivity in multisensual performance installations that invite the audience to explore their surroundings in tender, soft and kind ways. Weaving together disability justice principles, intimate encounters, and the celebration of care webs, ari’s work aims to create spaces that resonate with souls seeking community and liberation.
WET Collective
Instagram: @anyapalamartschuk @xuyixin @baqert
WET Collective is a transdisciplinary collaboration between Fatemeh Bagheri, Anya Palamartschuk and Xu Yixin. Together, they explore the ecosystem of skin and heritage through queer, tender interconnections. Their practices begin with the body, through performance, sculpture, sound, bio-materials and stretch into microcosms of language, memory and transformation. WET is asking: what is re-born when our stories touch?
WORKS PRESENTED
The Crossing: Tenderness (workshop)
What does it mean to truly feel tenderness, to be touched rather than to touch? In this 40-minute guided workshop, we explore touch and tenderness through somatic and relational practices. Participants notice how their bodies soften, open, or withdraw in response to contact, attention, and presence.
The workshop moves from solo awareness to collective connection, like stepping through a subtle threshold into a new reality. Participants start by connecting with their own bodily sensations and movements, cultivating receptivity and tenderness. They then engage in consent-based touch exercises with a partner, observing how tenderness arises and how attention shapes the quality of contact. Finally, the group moves and plays together, discovering how shared presence amplifies tenderness and transforms individual experience into collective resonance.
The Crossing: Tenderness frames touch as a sensitive, speculative field where perception, memory, and bodily awareness continuously shape each other. The session balances solo reflection, playful connection, and group energy, offering a safe space where tenderness can be felt and shared. No prior experience is needed.
CripPleasurePower (screening)
"CripPleasurePower" is an experimental documentary/essay that invites viewers into the intimate realm of the artist’s desires by exploring the possibilities of aligning your pleasures with your values. This experimental journey seeks to liberate individuals from conventional notions of sex, urging a profound connection with one’s own erotic power as a life force.
By delving into the rich tapestry and amplifying the voices and experiences of disabled individuals, the film celebrates a crip sexual culture, broadening our constrained definitions of sex. The narrative dismantles normative beliefs, questioning the entrenched notion that nondisabled, heteronormative sex is the sole and default expression of intimacy.
Fragment II: Porosity (performance)
What does it mean to be held by skin that is not your own? Fragment II: Porosity is a durational performance inhabiting the fragile, charged space between bodies, where heritage skin masks dissolve boundaries, bio-materials breathe and decay, and the body becomes both landscape and archive. Drawing on queer ecology, glitch feminism, and collective embodiment, the artists move beneath and through temporary skins, surfacing stories that resist singular telling.
Intimacy here is not private. It is built in openness – through whispers passed between strangers, personal texts read aloud into uncertain air, the slow labor of stitching a transitioning body, chanting that rises and falls without resolution. Live improvisational sound threads through reflection and flesh, composing an atmosphere in which closeness becomes its own form of language.
This is an ecosystem. Tender, queer, nonlinear. The performers weave a collective archive of bodily narratives, of queerness, temporality, connection, and decay, not as fixed record but as living tissue: always shifting, always touching, never complete.
Read more about the series here.
