SJ Rahatoka (aka Jayden Ka), Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau + Jao Moon

I Can Hear Their Whispers
SJ Rahatoka (aka Jayden Ka)

And then they appear
Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau and Jao Moon

I Can Hear Their Whispers is an interactive performance between a filmmaker, the characters in his films, and the audience. He believes that they continue to exist beyond the screening, in their own universe somewhat parallel to ours. At times, he feels he can hear them whispering. In this interdimensional dance ritual combining film clips, archives from the 1970s, and live performance, SJ seeks to honor his characters and the people who inspired them, summon them to the audience, and allow them to lead us astray. 

And then they appear is a performative installation that reimagines Marian imagery from Colombian popular culture through a queer and non-binary perspective. The work places the body on a threshold between the sacred, the monumental, and the vulnerable, as a site of apparition, transition, and transformation. Here, the queer body ceases to be an object of moral punishment and becomes an altar-body, an apparition-body, a body without sin. 

SJ Rahatoka (aka Jayden Ka) is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary performance creator based in Berlin. He is from Madagascar and Mauritius and was raised in France. SJ’s creations explore the themes of Afrofuturism, Trans identity, Ancestral Healing and Interconnectedness. 

Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau is a German-Colombian interdisciplinary artist working across video art, installation, experimental cinema, and performance, with a focus on decolonial subjectivities and queer cultures. 

Jao Moon grew up in the marginalized periphery of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Living in an environment of constant resistance made them question the predominant social orders, this became the matter of Jao Moon’s work. Jao Moon’s work interrogates dominant social structures through the lens of queerness, migration, and diaspora.