WORKSHOP MAIKON K [PERFORMATIVE TRANSGRESSIONS]
SELF-UNCENSORED
Workshop: Performance
Profile: Open to performing arts and performance creators
Dates: July 20–24, 2026
Schedule: 7:30 pm–11:30 pm
Location: Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista, Lisbon
Language: Portuguese
Free participation
Maximum number of participants: 13
Application deadline: June 19, 2026
Notification of selected applicants: by July 1, 2026
Application form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfdR-aEpdfqbflaAFnaf4406keUrCWvizBmnQhnxwjfq-kbMg/viewform?usp=header
We will investigate ways of altering sensory perception, challenging social norms and notions of reality. The focus will be on creating experiences for the reconfiguration of individual and collective senses.
The concept of transgression will serve as a guiding thread, provoking us to think about how art can estrange the world, disturbing categories and behaviours. A body that no longer identifies solely as human challenges social statutes through the displacement of senses and language. A body can become other things and other beings and, in doing so, place the world in a state of delirium and risk, creating its own rules.
How can we understand the limits of society and the body and use them as working material? Transgression will be approached as a “radical disposition towards displacement”, a force capable of changing the position and state of things. We will practise using this force-concept to create actions and experiences.
Some questions to explore:
— The body as crossing
We will discover how time, space and identity can be altered through bodily actions and practices. What limits can still be crossed when we already live in a daily reality of unbearable conditions — of predation and exploitation of the environment and bodies? Which limits are truly real?
— Scatological poetics
The abject violates aesthetic standards while simultaneously fascinating through the power of its raw state. Classifying deviation as pathology strips it of its contestatory force.
What strategies of confrontation, communication and rupture can an artist build when dealing with these issues? What provokes the shock of the senses and why? What actions and situations put at risk the standards of civilisation and the very idea of humanity?
— The transit between languages
Performance art has contaminated all fields of art, communication and entertainment. Does this demonstrate its strength or announce its failure? To what extent does performance still challenge us?
How can one open oneself to the promiscuity of forms and meanings? What crosses through and drives an artist at the moment of configuring the interfaces of their work?
— Experiences with materials and artists’ archives
How can we establish relationships with different materials and allow ourselves to be transformed by them? What do materials teach us and what do they invite us to do?
We will also look at actions by other artists, examining how a question can unfold into different forms and contexts.
Maikon K is a Brazilian artist working between performance and dance. He currently lives in Rio de Janeiro, where he attends a Master’s programme in Performing Arts at UFRJ, developing the creation of a “pedagogy of transgression” through performance art.
In 2020 he moved to Berlin with the support of the Martin Roth Initiative, an institution protecting and supporting artists at risk, after episodes of censorship against his work in Brazil. In 2022 he received the Weltoffenes Berlin grant, in partnership with Tanzfabrik, to investigate transgression in the field of the arts.
As a solo artist, he has created pieces investigating the shamanic body, scatological poetics and altered states of consciousness. In 2015 he was invited by Marina Abramović to present the performance DNA de DAN at the exhibition Terra Comunal in São Paulo.
In Berlin he collaborated as dramaturg with choreographers Michelle Moura (Overtongue, Lessons for Cadavers, Boca Cova) and Renae Shadler (Under my Gaze, Greyline), while also teaching classes at HZT – Berlin University of Dance.
He has presented his work at major festivals in Brazil, as well as in Portugal, Italy and Germany.
Maikon K
Performance artist and dramaturg
www.maikonk.com
Application form
• Name
• Email
• Phone number
• City / Country of residence
• Short biography
• Link to a video of previous work (full work)
Application form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfdR-aEpdfqbflaAFnaf4406keUrCWvizBmnQhnxwjfq-kbMg/viewform?usp=header
Contact for additional information:
+351964728435
Maikon K is part of the Self-Uncensored Festival, edition [Transgressions], presented on July 19, 2026, at Sala Estúdio Valentim de Barros, Lisbon.*
Self-Uncensored is a project that questions contemporary forms of censorship in “democratic” contexts, focusing on the mechanisms that lead to self-censorship and internalised censorship, through an artistic programme presented over several months in the format of an expanded festival.
Production: ORG.I.A (SELF-MISTAKE)
Partnerships: Largo Residências and Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista
Institutional support: Lisbon City Council – Culture and Portuguese Republic – Culture, Youth and Sports / Directorate-General for the Arts
*LECTURE-PERFORMANCE (part of SELF-UNCENSORED [ON VOICE])
The Wolf and the Salmon Are Free to Kill
Performance as a state of exception. In this speech-action that conspires, Maikon K weaves together relations between crime, art and profanation in the search for a body that challenges the statutes of law. Are there really insurmountable limits for human beings, or can we oppose this fiction? And if together we decide that we are not human? What else would we wish to become?
