SOFT EDGES
"...laughter comes often enough to soften the edge."
— Audre Lorde
Soft Edges is an artistic research platform created by Mayıs Rukel and Lucie Gérard.
Founded with the intention of creating year-long deep dives into texts, artworks, films, and research that resonate with our practices, Soft Edges embraces a slow, attentive approach to collective analysis and reflection.
The platform’s first instalment centered around Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown. This exploration unfolded as a 12-episode podcast on Spotify, accompanied by a three-hour performance-workshop offered at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.
The podcast reached over 300 monthly listeners, including adrienne maree brown herself, who shared the project with her community.
Graphic design by Yuri Sato
Original music by Patrick Walinga
Soft Edges Workshop on Pleasure Activism
“Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.”
-amb
Published in 2019 by AK Press, Pleasure Activism, written and gathered by adrienne maree brown, is a foundational text for the artistic practices of Mayıs Rukel and filmmaker Lucie Gérard.
Together, they offer a three-hour performance-workshop shaped through sound, video, music, spoken word, discussion, and generative prompts; inviting a deeper, embodied engagement with the transformative offerings of this work.
The first iteration of the workshop took place in March 2022 at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, commissioned by the Master’s program Ecologies of Transformation.
For bookings and more information, please contact: rukelfilm@gmail.com
