Commuters at Berlin's Nollendorfplatz station in July 2025 could encounter a small group of Black queer performers moving through the ordinary rhythm of the platform. They wore clothes that belonged to city life, from drag to business casual. Their actions were quiet gestures of affection and care. The artists did not claim the space by building a stage above the crowd. They stayed within the flow of people coming and going, making a different kind of attention possible in a place designed for speed.
The work, Basics of Care, was created by Adrian Marie Blount with Cat Jones and Papa De. A billboard in the station showed a collage of reused images. The live actions unfolded nearby over several afternoons. Blount's project asked what it might mean for Black queer love to appear in public without becoming a spectacle for strangers. That question gives the action its tension. An underground station allows many bodies to share a space, but it does not guarantee that every body is equally safe or equally welcome there.
Blount, a California-born, Berlin-based artist who uses they/them pronouns, works across performance, direction, choreography, drag, sculpture and organising. They founded the House of Living Colors collective, whose 2020 stage production Endangered Species connected queer and trans people of colour to a discussion of ecological survival. Berlin's Ballhaus Naunynstraße describes Afrofuturism and drag among the methods in Blount's work. Across the stage production and the later station actions, their future is not a far-off image of perfect safety. It begins in the material question of how people make room for one another now.
The station as a shared room
Nollendorfplatz is a transport hub, not a theatre. People arrive to change trains, meet someone, go to work or go home. In nGbK's account of Basics of Care, Blount's collaborators improvised within this flow rather than stopping it for a conventional show. That placement altered the relation between performer and witness. Some passers-by may have noticed a gesture immediately; others may have taken it for an ordinary exchange between people who cared for one another. The work lived in that uncertainty.
Its public billboard made a different demand on attention. The collage used images that had already circulated elsewhere and placed Black queer tenderness into a visual field usually occupied by advertising. A station poster addresses people on their way to somewhere else. Blount used that quick encounter to ask what kinds of bodies and relations deserve visibility during a routine journey. The image did not need to sell a product or promise an escape from the city. It could mark the existing city as a place where love and care were happening.
The live actions gave that printed proposition a duration. According to the project record, Blount, Cat Jones and Papa De developed chapters called Overture: The Imaginary, Play Day, Books and Reading, and Love Language. The names move from imagining a world to inhabiting it through ordinary practices. Play and reading are not grand declarations, yet they offer ways of relating that can be repeated. Love language brings the body's daily communications into view. The sequence suggests a future rehearsed in small actions rather than announced once from a platform.
The project text explicitly resisted spectacle. That position matters for a performance in public, where anyone can look and where the artist cannot control the viewer's expectations. A tender touch may invite recognition, but it may also be subjected to a gaze that turns intimacy into entertainment. Blount's understated form holds both possibilities. The performers remain present as people, moving through the station rather than offering themselves as extraordinary specimens for an audience.
The clothes contribute to that effect. Drag can heighten an image and business casual can make it seem unremarkable; placing both within the same work refuses an easy division between flamboyance and everyday life. The performers' bodies are visible amid other commuters' bodies. They bring their own modes of self-presentation to a place where difference is often noticed only for a moment before the crowd moves on. Their gestures ask for a moment long enough to perceive care.
Blount's statement for the project speaks of the imaginary as a world people create in order to feel safe. In this setting, that world does not replace the platform with a fantasy backdrop. It coexists with tiled walls, transport schedules and the pressure of public space. An imagined safe place becomes something the performers practice together in a site where safety cannot be assumed. The form is modest, but the claim is large: Black queer presence can make a public space bear a different set of relations, even briefly.
The work was part of nGbK's Art in the Underground programme, which has used Berlin station advertising spaces for art for decades. Blount's contribution drew on that infrastructure while extending beyond the billboard. The poster remained available to passing eyes; the live activations gave it bodies, timing and exchange. Neither component fully explains the other. Together they make a public artwork that changes as people arrive, linger or leave.
What survives an endangered world
Five years earlier, Endangered Species at Sophiensæle brought House of Living Colors into a theatre. The venue describes a multimedia performance of voguing, spoken word, live music and other forms that placed queer and trans people of colour at the centre of the climate crisis. Its central analogy related human diversity to biodiversity: a society needs different lives and identities as an ecosystem needs varied forms of life. The production also drew on performers' knowledge and ancestral relationships with nature.
An analogy between people and endangered species could easily reduce human lives to a metaphor. The stage work's form gives the people speaking and moving the means to resist that reduction. Voguing is a dance practice with its own history of queer and trans invention. Spoken word can name a condition in the first person. Live music adds rhythm and collective timing. These are not merely illustrations of a climate argument. They are artistic practices through which performers appear as makers of knowledge, not as evidence for someone else's thesis.
The production's credits show how Blount shaped the work and how many others made it. They were responsible for dramaturgy, concept, choreography and costumes and performed as GodXXX Noirphiles. George Scott and Sophie Yukiko-Hasters assisted with choreography. Xixi Diana Yam Yam created projections and animation. Kyle Mckay designed sound, with Mandhla Ndubiwa assisting. The performers included Scott, Hasters, Lux Venerea, Mckay, Ndubiwa and Isu Mignon-Mignonne. The work's movement between stage bodies, projected images and sound depended on this ensemble.
That shared structure suited the subject. A show about interdependence would change meaning if it hid the people who made its visual and sonic world. Blount's direction gave the different contributions a frame, while the collaborators brought their own expertise and presence to the stage. The House of Living Colors was founded in response to exclusion from parts of mainstream queer culture. Its production made an alternative space through creative labour rather than waiting to be admitted to a room already defined by others.
Costume was one of Blount's credited responsibilities. In drag, clothing can alter scale, character, gender expectation and the body's relation to the audience. Here costume joined choreography and projection in an ecological proposition: how might bodies change, adapt and remain visible together? Fabric and appearance were part of the production's form, alongside movement and spoken words.
The combination of voguing and climate concern also changes the usual picture of an environmental stage work. A performance about threatened life might be expected to portray nature as distant landscape, separate from the city's queer cultural forms. Endangered Species brought the topic through practices made by communities navigating threat and exclusion. The future of the planet appeared inseparable from the question of whose bodies a society protects and whose knowledge it is prepared to hear.
Sophiensæle presented the work during Tanztage Berlin in January 2020. Its theatre offered lights, projections, a seated audience and a scheduled time. Five years later, Basics of Care placed related questions in a station where the audience was accidental and the setting could not be transformed so completely. The shift did not abandon performance. It tested how much of a performance could survive outside the protected frame of the stage.
Drag as a way of making space
Blount moved to Berlin in 2016 after theatre work in the United States. Their own biography describes a shift in focus toward directing, facilitation and organising. This trajectory helps explain why their practice includes both the image onstage and the social conditions that let someone make it. A collective has to be convened. Rehearsal requires time and trust. A public action requires negotiation with a site and with the people who enter it.
House of Living Colors brought queer and trans Black, Indigenous and other people of colour together through drag and performance. In Endangered Species, the collective's form did more than provide a cast. It supplied an artistic setting where multiple accounts of survival could coexist. One performer might work through a movement phrase; another through sound or speech. Projections altered the stage's scale. Costumes could make identities visible in ways the ordinary city might demand they keep small. Blount's concept drew those elements into an argument about evolution and mutual necessity.
Another project turns this concern with making together into a sculptural object. For Power Tower Pishibororo, shown at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in 2023, Blount made Ancestral Trees of Remembrance and Tradition from synthetic kanekalon hair and wire. Swirls of hair stand for time and life as multiple and changeable. Wire carries a harder ambiguity: it can constrain and wound, yet it can also form a boundary within which a practice is cultivated. In the artist's account, the work imagines a reconciliation among people on the African continent and in the diaspora through Afrofuturist aesthetics. The materials keep that imagined repair close to the history of hair's forced removal and the continued power of styling it.
Blount also led a hair-crown-making workshop for people living in the African diaspora. Its participants made objects of dignity with their hands rather than only observing a finished sculpture. The workshop's scale was small, with no more than ten participants advertised. It gave time for a technique to be learned, shared and altered. From the stage ensemble to the workshop table, Blount's future depends on people being able to make forms of belonging together.
Drag often uses excess, transformation and deliberate artifice. Those qualities sit comfortably with speculative art, but Blount's work also finds power in restraint. Basics of Care could include drag clothing among daily dress while keeping its gestures quiet. The performer who does not command attention can still change the meaning of the space for someone who notices. A future imagined through such attention is less like a single spectacular revelation than a habit of recognising one another.
Ballhaus Naunynstraße's description of Blount's Afrofuturism links it to drag, difference and environmental questions. That combination becomes concrete across these two works. Endangered Species uses a theatrical vocabulary of biodiversity and collective survival. Basics of Care asks what the city could feel like if Black queer tenderness were treated as ordinary public life. The earlier piece faces a threatened future; the later piece rehearses a means of living inside it. The connection lies in care understood as an action that needs form, space and other people.
Blount has also directed Qweendom at Theater Oberhausen and developed solo and collaborative work across Berlin venues. Their practice is wide, but breadth alone is not its distinguishing feature. The notable movement is between different scales of gathering: a theatre audience, a drag collective, a commuter platform, a workshop. Each scale changes what performance can ask of the people present. A stage can concentrate attention. A station can fold an action into everyday life. A workshop can give others tools to continue making after the artist leaves.
That attention to structure makes Blount more than an artist who illustrates a concept of inclusion. They arrange situations in which participation has a material shape. In the theatre, the ensemble's credits and specialised forms reveal a network of labour. In the station, collaborators share time and space with passers-by who never agreed to attend a show. The work invites relation without claiming that every witness will respond in the same way. Its hope remains grounded in what bodies can do together.
A future rehearsed in the present
Afrofuturism sometimes appears in popular imagery as dazzling technology: a new vehicle, a shining city, an altered body. Blount can work with projections and multimedia, while Endangered Species and Basics of Care turn attention toward an older and more difficult technology of living together. A choreography distributes bodies in space. A poster changes the image a city gives its travellers. A gesture of care creates a brief relation between people under public view. Each can be designed; none can be guaranteed to work once other people enter the scene.
That uncertainty is part of the art's seriousness. Basics of Care did not create a permanently safe Nollendorfplatz. Endangered Species could not end the climate crisis. The works instead made survival legible as a shared practice. They placed Black queer performers at the centre of the image and trusted their forms of movement, speech, music and tenderness to carry knowledge. The performance is not a forecast. It is an experiment in what a future requires from the present.
At the underground station, a passer-by might have seen two people moving gently toward one another and continued to the train. Another might have stopped at the billboard. The project could not determine either encounter. Its achievement was to make such encounters possible within the ordinary architecture of a city. Blount's work asks a question that reaches from the theatre to the platform: if care is necessary for survival, where will we allow it to appear? Their answer begins with bodies who are already here, making room for one another while the crowd moves around them.