Tender Motor shared two practices as part of the International Deleuze & Guattari Conference Pedagogies of Philosophy: Nonsense, and…and…and joy at Konstfack, Stockholm, 2025.
Tender Motor: A physical activation of sensibility and solidarity
The performance trio Tender Motor invites participants to a 20-minute wordless manifestation: a collective lament choir for Palestine. Through a simple yet powerful score titled The Circular Choir, participants were guided into a shared activation of breath, voice, and body. No prior experience was needed. The physical activation was a way to embody grief, care, and resistance together, activating our sensibility and relationality through sound and presence.
Tender Motor (Performance)
The performance practice from the performance Tender Motor was placed in one of the lecture spaces and inserted itself as a non-linguistic paper presentation, following the same routine as all the other paper presentations: 20 min of presentation and a following Q&A for 10 min.
In Tender Motor, the group takes a playful yet deadly serious step into the art form of ‘music’ to explore the politicized, socialized, and ideologized body through cracks of gender and the human. The group’s ongoing fascination with the ambivalent yet highly potent intersection of sound, breath, and movement is taken to a new destination. Through radical trust in process, in one another, and in the collective, affective, and mutating force that defines the body, the performance weaves inward and outward, continuously carried by expansive, soft, pulsating, rhythmic, desiring, vibrating, and listening forms and sounds. The performance Tender Motor is a sequel to the group’s previous works From a Throat of Flesh (2018) and When Dancing Was Done with the Lungs (2022).
Tender Motor
is a non-disciplinary performance trio with backgrounds in visual arts, poetry, choreography, dance, and art curation. The group consists of Kajsa Wadhia, Moa Franzén, and Tove Salmgren, a collaboration that has been exploring performance art and choreography since 2018 at the intersection of sound, breath, and movement. The group composes, improvises, and creates live works, curated events, and publications based on a radically process-oriented method that integrates all aspects of their lives into their shared artistic practice. Since January 2025, the group has been running the two-year research project Sonorous Dances and Reverberant Matters, supported by Stockholm University of the Arts’ internal artistic research program.