With Legs Wide Open – Schwules Museum Berlin
With Legs Wide Open is an exhibition on the whore history of Berlin, curated and researched by a collective of sex workers, artists and researchers.
Exhibition, Schwules Museum Berlin March - Nov 2024
Co-Curation, Research, Design and Performance
Over a year of research, curation and artistic production, I participated in the formation of the temporary and imaginative “museum of sex work” at the Schwule Museum, taking visitors on a ride through the history of sex work in Berlin and Germany. Structured in thematic departments, it spans decades, the diverse realities of whores and the conflicted discourses. The most important about this exhibition: it is done by sex workers along the logic of “Nothing about us without us!”, supported by their communities and the strong allyship of the Schwule Museum and its queer archive. As Objects of Desire collective , we were invited to co-create this seminal show.
The artfully composed catalogue to the exhibition can be ordered here: kontakt@schwulesmuseum.de
“The whores from the Museum of Sex Work speak out! In their lively, erotic, magical, funny and deeply political “Museum of Sex Work“. This museum has various departments, including an Apothecary, a Cloakroom, a Department of Complaints, a Department of Health, an Office for the Reclamation of Public Space, a Department of Destruction, a Department for Horizontal Labour and a Chapel. What has been compiled in these departments is not a chronological overview of the cultural history of sex work, but rather a queer, playful, sometimes magical linking of documents and associations – about alternative body knowledge, working conditions, non-normative sexuality, celebration and memorialization of ancestors, German bureaucracy fetishism, colonialist and National Socialist alienation and mourning.
The history of sex work has so far been written, if at all, mainly by its regulators and oppressors. In public discourse about sex work, there are many opinions and very strong feelings but little data. Those with expertise which only comes from lived experience are almost never asked. So-called “Schutzgesetze” have been developed largely without involving sex workers. In With Legs Wide Open, this story is written differently. A narrative unfolds that is characterized by pride, self-determination, and the fight for justice. The Museum of Sex Work at Schwules Museum presents – with legs wide open – an unprecedented display of the art of survival and a political vision of worker’s rights for all.”
