Femina Saga – Genesis
In Femina Saga – Genesis, ZOE dedicates herself to the tension arising between the image of the witch and the one of the mother as narratives for female reality in life. She reflects upon the instrumentalisation of bodies and their stories, dissecting them towards the moment of their creation. With Femina Saga – Genesis, ZOE continues what was begun in the play FEMINA SAGA – a ritual journey back in 2020. In it, ZOE already unveiled the archetype of the witch to her audience, asking for the reasons behind her persecution, and how that story is reproduced in the present. From matriarchy to myths to spaces for modern magic – as a next chapter of Femina Saga, the performance takes its audience on a journey between fact and fiction, pain and rapture, prosecution and rehabilitation. ZOE’s artistic practice is composed of elements taken from voguing, poetry, and singing. She finds a language of resistance therein, and of a reappropriation of history for those who are overlooked, oppressed, exploited, and marginalised in our society.
ZOE is an interdisciplinary performance artist and curator from Düsseldorf. From an Afro-diasporic and feminist perspective, she reflects rehabilitation, transformation, and the (re)appropriation of body and space in her artistic works. Additionally, she investigates the relation between power and marginalisation. In this, she focuses on the visibility and the empowerment of structurally discriminated persons and their stories. ZOE is among the first-generation voguing performers in Germany and is considered to be among the leading figures for Ballroom culture in the German-speaking countries. She was a longstanding founding member of House of Melody (now House of Saint Laurent) which established the scene in Germany. In the meantime, she has become the mother of the international House of Elle, a well-established Ballroom House from New York City. ZOE, with collective Shapes&Shades, co-founded by her, has successfully been producing formats to support Ballroom culture in North Rhine-Westphalia since 2021. She is currently one of three stipendiaries of the support programme Präsenz vor Ort (Presence On-Site), set up by the Frauenkulturbüro NRW (Women’s Culture Office of North Rhine-Westphalia)