Don't Be Afraid: Vulva Lives! – A Laboratory for Art and Spirituality

If you look at the history of women* in the church and the art world, the words “sacred” and “scared” suddenly become easily confused. With the entry into patriarchy around 5,000 years ago, the relationship with the female force became severely out of balance. Suddenly, the Great Goddess became an esoteric-hysterical witch with a warty nose and a broomstick. What happened? Who offended whom? And with what artistic means can we get out of this again? To find out, the two artists Philine Velhagen and Felizitas Stilleke are launching a two-week laboratory in late summer 2026. Together with eight other lab sisters from the Cologne and Berlin performance scene, they dare to bridge the gap between art and spirituality, faith and doubt, resistance and creativity. They collectively seek rituals for transformation, crisis, letting go, and other moments they face in artistic creation and in life. Because for them, one thing is as certain as the Amen in church: A resilient society needs rituals of cohesion beyond denominational affiliation and moralizing sermons! So they embark on a queer-feminist search for new collective practices. And what place could be more suitable for such a search than the deconsecrated church of the Dominican monastery in the city center? The laboratory invites participation on four days.