Angela Alves & Lovis Heuss
NETWORK NEURODIVERSITY: Un//masking as artistic practice
Blockseminar, Deutsch/English, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Saturdays/Sundays, 7./8.11. & 14./15.11.2026, each 11-17 h
HZT Campus Uferstudios, Studio 11

Please save the date: There will be an online pre-event introducing the un//masking zines on 7 October 2026 at 3pm. In this conversation, Lovis Heuss will speak with Angela Alves about the collaboration.

Anmeldung auf Moodle ab / Registration on Moodle begins 12.10.2026: https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=3320
Einschreibeschlüssel / Enrollment Key:neurodiverse

This seminar creates a space for neurodivergent creative processes, access needs, rest, and collective reflection, grounded in disability joy and critical theory. Bringing together Lovis Heuss’ self-published zine series un//masking the performing arts and Angela Alves’ Care Pods practice, the seminar explores how artistic creation, care, and collective support can work together.The seminar is designed especially for neurodivergent people and welcomes anyone interested in rethinking learning through care, solidarity, and collective practice. Throughout the seminar, un//masking and Care Pods are explored as connected practices. Un//maskingquestions neuronormative expectations in art-making and public life. Care Pods create collective spaces for reflection, processing experiences, and supporting one another. The mornings draw on the un//masking zines as a toolkit and research practice. Through embodied exercises, theory inputs, sCRIPts (scores), disability arts examples, and collective experiments, participants explore neurodivergent approaches to artistic creation. Together, we investigate how un//masking can become a daily practice of resistance and how artistic processes can move beyond expected norms toward more neurodivergent-friendly ways of creating. The afternoons build on Care Pods through sharing circles based on free associative speech, without interruption, judgement, advice, or pressure to solve problems. Care Pods become both an access practice and an artistic method: a space to process experiences, sustain collective learning, and strengthen support networks. Rest is centred throughout the seminar as both an artistic practice and a form of un//masking. Sessions begin with horizontal rest, creating space for different ways of learning, listening, and being together. The participants gain practical and theoretical experience with the un//masking methodology, informed by disability as method, aesthetics of access, neuroqueer disidentification, and the neurodiversity paradigm. The seminar centres neurodivergent experiences and offers working methods that participants can adapt to their own artistic and collaborative practices.

Voraussetzung für die Teilnahme / Prerequisites for Participation: neurodivergent perspective
Leistungsanforderungen für den unbenoteten Schein / Fulfilment criteria for ungraded accreditation: active participation

Angela Alves lives with a chronic neurological condition in Berlin and works as a choreographer, dancer and cultural worker at the intersection of art, body and politics. In her work, she questions the dominant social storytelling of ‘healthy’ and ‘sick’ and counters blank spaces and contradictions with her sensitive and intelligent nervous system. From the perspective of lived experience, anti-ableist performances and sound installations are created, as well as a cultural practice of mutual care and solidarity, which Alves trains in collaboration with others. Angela Alves studied dance at ArtEZ (NL) and dance studies at the FU Berlin. Since October 2023, she has been working as an artistic associate in the project team of Prof. Claire Cunningham at the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT), where she researches, teaches and practices neurocrip-feminist practices such as resting, quitting and pleasuring.

Lovis Heuss (1990) is a transdisciplinary artist, performer, and drag persona from Zurich. Lovis’s work draws on experiences from queer subculture, Crip Spaces, and collectively organized activism, and explores themes such as un//masking, neuroqueering, gender, and the aesthetics of access. Lovis Heuss is currently working on the ongoing research project “un//masking the Performing Arts” and has already co-curated events for the Zürcher Theater Spektakel (treehouse 2024/25/26) and the Gessnerallee (Relaxed Feiern 2026/27). In addition, Lovis performs solo (Peepshow, 2026), with the independent performance collective CHICKS* (MASTEKTOMIE. A Bittersweet Farewell Song, 2024), and with director Tomer Zirkilevich (SODOM, 2025).