Interview with writer Brigid Fitch

by | indielit

Brigid Fitch holds an illustrious plethora of literary awards as a poet and an essayist, trained as a dancer, and studied sound art and noise music. Her performances push boundaries every day, crossing genre, crossing gender. She incorporates her own text in audiovisual performances that she designs, and we are just stoked that she will appear on November 7th in Posh Teckel with us. Naturally I wanted to know what she will bring along, so I asked…

On November 7th… What can the audience expect from you at the indieberlin book lounge?
I plan to read an assortment of poems I’ve written over the past several years, hopefully finding a thread amongst them all.

What kind of things do you write about?
Things that move me to intense emotion – writing for me is a place to express things I otherwise couldn’t. Sometimes that means writing about art that viscerally affects me, sometimes it’s things from my personal life and relationships. My most recent album, A Stranger Sound, is all about experiencing gender dysphoria while high on ecstasy at various clubs around Berlin. At its core I think the dichotomy of simultaneous ecstasy and dysphoria is something a lot of people in the party scene can relate to, though obviously often for very different reasons.

So… Do you like living in Berlin, then?
I’ve been through a lot of negative shit here, and I don’t have rosy glasses on when I say this, but for me, it’s truly the only place I’ve been in the world that really feels like home!

You’ve got your own performance club! Talk us through that…
Since July 2015 I’ve been running a monthly performance series at a queer bar in Neukölln called CLUB. It’s called Yes/No/Other/All: Performance on the Boundaries of Identity, and more or less does what it says on the label! 3-5 artists per month present work dealing with how they conceive of or express one or many facets of their identity. I was struggling a lot with two things when I conceived of the series: one, that a lot of times in queer spaces you just get a lot of visibility for rich, white, cis gay men, and also that performance about identity often gets totally segregated, ie you have feminist events or refugee events or queer events without any sort of communication or intersection amongst these little bullet points and I really wanted to resist both of those things with this series. So far it’s been pretty successful I think.

Amazing! Where do I sign up?!

You go to Yes/No/Other/All: facebook.com/yes.no.other.all

What brought you to Berlin in the first place?
I first came here in 2009 to study sound art and noise music, and came back in 2012 to do performance art and make music – I had been living in Brooklyn, where I managed to make and show some performance work, but for me it’s much more sustainable to live as an artist here in Berlin.

Wow! And where do you wanna take things at this point?
Ha, that’s quite a question! My goal is always to integrate all of the disciplines I work with as much as possible, but also just to take every opportunity I can and have fun with it. Currently I’m working on a live show (incorporating performance art and music) for my new EP, A Stranger Sound, which I’d love to tour with once it’s developed.

And where can we find the music?
My music: Brigidfitch.bandcamp.com

On top of her stage reading, Brigid Fitch will give an intimate reading in the fluffy booth at the back of the bar — to ONE person. Come, and be the lucky one. Prepare to be entranced!

Interview by Polly Trope, Literary Editor and autor of Cured Meat.

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