Sensitive Machines is a performance that explores the tension between technology, power, and gender. It examines the interaction between the body and industrial machinery through movement, sound, and voice. The boundaries between productive labor and performative action blur: drilling, grinding, and sawing become choreography, intimacy, and critique. With the intention of rethinking concepts of functionality and productivity, the artists ask: What does functional movement mean, and where does it intersect with desire, pleasure, or destruction?

In the interplay between performers and machines, machines become readable as speculative extensions of the body. A cyborg science fiction world emerges in which both bodies and sexuality as well as work and technology are renegotiated. Through live recordings and the distortion of machine noises, sound artist Caterina Gobbi creates a sonic space that blurs the boundary between human and machine rhythms. Imaginative spaces open up for the audience, allowing them to experience the machines in unfamiliar contexts.

The performance challenges stereotypical images of work, deconstructs the patriarchal connotations of technology, and develops new narratives about human-machine intimacy: machines become dance partners, adversaries, and bodily extensions. Through a humorous approach, the performers discover new ways of engaging with and interpreting the world of machines. The work is created in close collaboration between Marlen Pflüger (choreography, performance), Eva Weibel (co-choreography, performance), and Caterina Gobbi (sound).

Spoiler Aktionsraum

Spoiler creates short-term and collaborative opportunities for group exhibitions, interventions, and performances by artists from the independent scene. Spoiler does this by opening up and creating temporary locations in the city and making them available for temporary use for art production and the public. From 2019 to 2024, a former car dealership was its permanent location until it was demolished. Since 2025, it has been a former car repair shop in Berlin-Moabit. Spoiler sees itself as a platform for young artists and projects that cannot find a place elsewhere. The program is largely based on submissions and suggestions from the independent scene—impulses from outside are taken up and realized together. Spoiler is led by a group of six curators and is funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.

Founded: 2019