Lullaby for the End of the World: Post-Identitarian Bodies for a Haunted Writing of the Collective Future

The essay analyzes the short film Sommerspiele (2023) by choreographer Eszter Salamon as a queer transfeminist science fiction, drawing on the epistemological tools provided by Dance and Performance Studies. Within the empty spaces of Berlin’s Olympia Stadium, Salamon calls forth echoes of the past through a post-identitarian body. The life, work, and distinctive style of Valeska Gert (1892‑1978) – a German dancer, actress, and cabaret performer who escaped Nazi Germany due to racial laws – are referenced to question the ongoing exclusion of non-normative bodies and materialities by prevailing white, Western, and heteronormative discourses. To cite a definition developed by Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Sommerspiele is a “speculative fabulation” in which the past haunts the present, creating space to imagine and shape an alternative collective future.