Xenia Taniko
March 1st, 2024
I am backlogged with words, emotions, experiences, transformations, and instead of rushing or forcing or fighting to get it all out—- I’ve been attempting to move at a pace of resistance against the roar. Soft time amidst hard edges. It wasn’t my intention to have my artist and writing practice revolve so heavily around death, reverence, and how we remember lives lost, but here we are, another one. A necessity.
One of the reasons is that I lost a friend last week, a brilliant artist and member of the Berlin performance community, a collaborator, powerful witch, hot dyke, a XOIR co-conspirator. I met Xenia Taniko through my friends lexi and effie while Xenia was leading a Kundalini Yoga Community Class at HeileHaus in Berlin. Xenia and my relationship deepened when I became their mentor for ACUD’s Amplify program, in which Xenia had begun a journey of performing and working with their voice in performance. They produced a gorgeous composition with voice and drums called 17 floors. Their live performances were haunting and hypnotic, like watching an ancient form of witchcraft unfold into the present. It stayed on the body. How to stay with the research, the curiosity, the uncertainty, the unnameable; Xenia embodied that in so many ways.
Xenia was a dedicated agent of resistance, a trickster who was not afraid of the darkness, and a person who deeply understood the necessity of collective work. In 2020 we joined a studio together and spent a week building a sprung Marley dance floor with our studio mates. It was something we had both never done before, but Xenia’s tenacity and precision with mathematics made it work. Cutting together and drilling wood, trial and error, sweat and persistence— I was in awe of their commitment.
In our time in the studio together we went through some real shit together. Communal work is not easy, especially when bad-faith actors arrive and shake things up. Throughout dealing with deeply intense interpersonal issues, I was again moved by Xenia’s clarity and placidity amidst the storm. Calm and collected like the surface of a lake with no wind, they represented grace and generosity in times of collective crisis.
It is hard to imagine that along with a person passing, their wisdom is gone with them, but looking at the brilliant and heart-centered community they left behind, I see Xenia’s wisdom and practices live on. I can still feel the resonance of those chants the first time I sat in practice with them.
I am reminded by Xenia about work that is unseen; art intentionally made to exist without observation, without audience, for the sake of itself. I want to encourage others to honor this way of being an artist; to make and be and see beyond the precomposed channels of where art should go.
A friendly reminder here to cherish and hold on to the ones you love. Tell your friends that you love them, show them that you love them with meals, messages, memes, slow soft time together. If you are my friend (or a stranger!) and you are reading this, I love you and am sending a breath of peace your way today. Hold on to what you got. Hold on to each other.