Mermaiding

Through mermaiding, the act of posing and performing with a mermaid tail, I explore the mermaid body as a lived, trans-species practice. My work moves beyond the pop-cultural phenomenon of #mermaiding on Instagram, where shapeshifting often serves spectacle, to investigate how the mermaid can interrupt Western assumptions of the human body and its boundaries. By inhabiting this body across landscapes, waters, and urban environments, I ask what forms of relation and kinship with nonhumans might emerge when myth becomes lived practice.

Residencies: In 2023, I developed this inquiry through residencies such as Mermade Outer Space  (Martian Chronicles, Greece) and Looking for Iara   (LABVerde, Amazonas, Brazil). These video works place my in-between body within ‘alien’ terrains—ruins, forests, outer space—seeking water and trans-species companions.​

Live works: In my live performance projects Is this Mermaid Naked? and Mermaid in the City, both presented in Vienna, I explore the interplay between land-based embodiment, urban mythologies, and playful performativity. These works combine a cabaret-like character with moments of lip-syncing, theatricality, and audience interaction, including a mermaid nude drawing class that invites participants to engage directly with the trans-species body. By foregrounding the “land body” and its connection to local myths and urban environments, the performances blend fact, folklore, and imagination, challenging the veracity and elasticity of storytelling. Moving a mermaid body through streets, public spaces, and intimate encounters, these works create immersive experiences that encourage reflection on kinship, ecological interconnection, and embodied relationality in the city.

Collaborations: My practice also explores trans-species embodiment, ecological kinship, and multispecies relationality through collaborative projects across performance, installation, and digital media. In Tentacular Diorama ( Vienna, 2024), developed with textile artist Erika Farina, combined soft sculpture, sound, and performance to invite audiences into a speculative multispecies landscape, reimagining fluid kinships. Unlovable Creatures, created collaboratively at the Synthetic Minds Lab, uses motion capture, AI, and mythology to explore nonhuman intelligences, with the mermaid mediating between human and nonhuman worlds. In the video work Mermaid Utopia: A Conversation on a Sofa, a collaboration with Pilvi Porkola, extends this inquiry into dialogue, space, and shared imagination. Across these projects, collaboration is central, enabling movement, sensory engagement, and storytelling to foster ecological solidarity and challenge anthropocentric perspectives.

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​Grounded in Donna Haraway’s vision of humannature as a continuum and Silvia Federici’s call to “re-enchant the world,” my practice treats mermaiding as both resistance and reorientation: a way to disrupt capitalist alienation, dualist logics, and species hierarchies. Through performance, storytelling, and visual mapping, I invite audiences to experience the mermaid body not as fantasy, but as a method for rethinking ecological intimacy, queer futures, and shared vulnerability.​

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