Julia Nitschke is a performance artist and researcher whose practice centers on queer archival interventions in post-industrial contexts. For years, she has investigated the Ruhr region and Upper Silesia through a queer lens, uncovering erased histories and marginalized narratives—most notably in her work with Grupa Mauczka (e.g., Holy Spits / Święta Ślina, Manifesta 16 Ruhr) and in From Ahead Our Time, a drag and burlesque performance that reanimates queer archival material from both regions.
Her artistic strategies include archival research as performance, as well as travesty, drag, and schlager music—exemplified by her co-founded collective RuhrgebietsSpatzen, which reinterprets German schlager through a queer, feminist framework. Her projects often bridge academic research, oral history, and performative storytelling to challenge heteronormative industrial heritage narratives.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Dark Room Ruhr: Queer Precarity and the Afterlives of Deindustrialization in the Ruhr and Upper Silesia
This interdisciplinary project uncovers the erased queer histories of mining communities in Germany’s Ruhr region and Poland’s Upper Silesia, linking industrial heritage, deindustrialization, and marginalized identities. Through archival research, oral histories, and a lecture performance featuring travesty elements, it explores how queer miners navigated hyper-masculine cultures and how economic transformations reshaped queer lives and networks. By centering marginalized voices and using artistic methods to reveal hidden narratives, the project challenges heteronormative frameworks in industrial heritage discourse and strengthens transnational queer networks between the two regions.
