In the 2025 SUBMERGE festival at Lake Studios, invited artists presented performance works alongside workshops, sharing practices that shaped their work. Siegmar Zacharias’ I don’t want to swallow anymore was presented on 16 August.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to participate in the workshop ‘LEARNING FROM PLANTS ABOUT REFUSAL, SOLIDARITY AND DIGESTION’ by Siegmar Zacharias, but I did travel to Friedrichshagen, lush with plant life, for her midday performance the next day, evocatively described as a “somacoustic drooling lecture”.
Zacharias stood exuding glamour in the light-filled studio before the curving rows of seats. She wore a pleather pencil skirt and a chiffon shirt. Her hands were streaked in light purple paint to the wrist—like she’d dunked them in acidic slime, weeding a toxic swamp. She held a microphone to her lips, painted a vivid pink-red.
As we settled, she filled the mic with wet suckling sounds—tongue pressing against the fleshy walls and roof of her mouth, jaw loosening, chewing. The unseen cavern swelled with liquid, its contracting walls enclosing us.
She pinched the skin of her cheek, pulling it in and out, the moist tissue squelching as it suctioned and released from teeth and gums. I felt the echo in my own inflamed cheek, a blind pimple pulsing under the skin. In her accordion-like tugging, I viscerally recognised the tender fragility of our permeable skin—elastic, secreting, perspiring, oozing within.
The slurping soundscape began to voice. First came a murmur of unintelligible sounds, then words formed. The reservoir of saliva spilled over her lips, smearing lipstick, dribbled over her chin, and expanded into a stain on her blouse. Her words—obscured by the continuous mouthwatering—spoke, in fragments, of saliva: enabler of speech, eating, and sex. Conditioned affectively, Zacarias entwined meaning with its material production.
Her flowing lecture led to dead whales on Danish and German shores, stomachs crammed with plastic garbage. Victims of human impact, intensified by climate crises, that threaten their survival. The theme of encased and encasing bodies continued, highlighting the disturbing contrast between the long-term durability of a car engine and the shorter lifespan of a whale that ingests it. Saliva continued to leak and spread. Now and then, she let out a haunting cry, a whale’s song.
Her dribbling utterances moved to human victims, tracing entangled stories of entrapment: thousands of dead bodies buried in bags, killed by bombs, shooting, and starvation. Not swallowing is a firm, subtle refusal of injustice, a stance against its incorporation, absorption, digestion, and normalisation. Her liquid body drooled resistance, spilling in solidarity with the oppressed, killed, martyred. Refusing to embody, or accept, an act of protest, paradoxically and skillfully made the horrors she denounced crucially visible and felt—a powerful act in Berlin, where protests against the oppression of Palestinians are still often brutally repressed. Her drooling may have been learning from plants’ ‘guttation’ (exuding sap from the edges of their leaves, releasing excess water received from their roots). I am grateful for a performance insisting that global atrocities are inseparable from our responsibilities and freedoms. Like plants, we are connected via many common, structural systems.
I don’t want to swallow anymore, by Siegmar Zacharias was presented on 16 August 2025, in the frame of SUBMERGE festival at Lake Studios.
