If You Ask Me What I Want, I’ll Tell You. I Want Everything, 2017

Still by Richard Hancock

“Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.”
– Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

“Language pre-supposes community. Therefore without you, nothing I say has any meaning.”
– Kathy Acker

If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything is a work in which Rosenfeld offers their body as a potential site of movement to be stored as a future sustainable energy source. Through relationality and exchange, and with echoes of a science fiction narrative, Rosenfeld has built a choreography with a group of intimate and inspirational bodies exploring questions of the future and labour of queer relationships and desire in the face of climate change.  Even though the work’s propositions are disseminated through Rosenfeld’s body, the piece challenges the futurity of individuation and the ideology of ‘the solo,’ exploring the flesh in the wake of environmental decay.  

This work has been formed collaboratively with a collective effort of bodies and movements merged and stored within Rosenfeld’s own. Rosenfeld shared studio time with friends, lovers, environmental workers, philosophers and activists, inspired by questions of the future sustainability of queer desire in the face of climate change. Rosenfeld is a flesh-body serving as a material root of their own methodology, and producing a systemic rupturing of movement, ropes, light and sound. 

When we are left with only our flesh as a natural resource, how can bodies stay sustainably useful together through movement and time?

If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything is one of the final works in a two year creative body of research, in which Rosenfeld has been exploring and creating towards her first feature film FOXES. Through performance, short videos & films, drawings, collages and expanded cinema installations, Rosenfeld has been researching themes of queer desire, climate change, invisible genocide, and radical- positive apocalypse.
You can read more about FOXES, and the creative research behind it, here.

we made weather together. we made food together. we ate our cloud and our mist. we ate the snow and the low pressure system. passing the threshold of last. undecided weather. confused weather.  a weather of uncertainty. a blackout. we dug our fists into the sand. we made potential, maybe. 

If You Ask Me What I Want, I’ll Tell You, I Want Everything, premiered in November 2017, at Sophiensaele, in Berlin, Germany.
sophiensaele.com

Artistic Collaboration: Jared Gradinger/ Rodrigo Garcia Alves
Music: Mika Risiko
Lighting Design: Sandra Blatterer
Costume Design/ Set: Stephane Moune
Tattoo Artist: Fercha Pombo
Producers: Björn Pätz/ Joseph Wegmann
Photo Credits in order of appearance: Christa Holka, Imogen Heath, Rodrigo Garcia Alves and Alexa Vachon.

Trailer: Liz Rosenfeld