unclear | Rooming with Shadows | Becoming Cyborg Made Me Human
A live art, storytelling, music, immersive experience
Louise WESTERHOUT and Denise LL ONEN
13+
Note from the Artists
We invite you to an inclusive, immersive, co-held offering where we will move through experiences together.
Our friendship intersects art and allyship and often our unique and intense sharing can be 2am voice note exchanges, sharing our fears and prayers while the world sleeps. Finally saying goodnight and sleeping a little safer knowing the other is a beloved. We want to share with you some of the themes of these conversations.
This is an exploration of the micropolitics of care and decolonising the hierarchies between performer and audience, listener and storyteller. We bring our offering, extending the warmest invitation to our kin: queer, disabled, BIPOC, survivors
unclear written and performed by Louise WESTERHOUT | Rooming with Shadows written and performed by Denise ONEN | Becoming Cyborg Made Me Human (film) by Louise WESTERHOUT with sonic composition by Denise ONEN
unclear and Rooming with Shadows were premiered in 2022 at Body Politic. Both pieces forged out of harrowing experiences. Louise and Denise as survivors and activists have worked hard to restore their settings and now in 2025 present the evolved versions of the same pieces, imbued with presence, critical theory, rage, wisdom and self-knowledge. Louise and Denise also present the South African premiere of Becoming Cyborg Made Me Human, a film which has enjoyed critical success and been well received in Germany and Cyprus.
We, in particular, are sharing reflexively from a place of vulnerability. Because of the nature of sharing, we want to create a space that is centred in care and awareness: awareness about what we are sharing/showing as art, but also about being in process, seeking/exploring safe sharing together.
We would like to create a space that holds people — the way we hold each other’s vulnerability as friends.
ARTIST BIOS
Louise Westerhout
https://louisewesterhout.com/
Louise (she/they) is a queer, disabled artist based in CapeTown, SA. They are a performance artist, curator, writer, activist, therapist, educator. Their research is dedicated to themes of consciousness, posthumanism, crip queer aesthetics, Wicca, anti-speciesism, trauma and healing, social justice. They have taught Disability and Gender Justice in South Africa, Switzerland and Sweden.
Their critically acclaimed performances have been featured on all major South African platforms: National Arts Festival, Infecting The City, ICA Live Art Festival, Artsability Festival, Vrystaat Kunstefees, as well as Beweggrund (Switzerland), Berlin and Beyond DisDance (Cyprus). Westerhout was artist-in-residence in the University of Johannesburg’s Arts & Culture programme for 2024.
Denise L.L. Onen
www.deniseonen.com
Onen is an undeniable pathbreaker in her sonic cultural practice. Having honed her unique sensitivity to the world into a broad, burgeoning career, she’s already tried her hand at (nearly) everything sonic – professional installations, compositions, soundtracks, multi-valent production, technical recording, theatre.
As the first black feminine body student to receive a BMus degree specialising in Music Technology from the University of Cape Town, she is now on track to surpass herself by earning a Masters from the same department specialising in graphic scoring and analysis.
In the meantime, she’s been in demand. Short films and documentaries for which she has crafted sound designs have played to diverse plaudits at festivals in Durban, Cape Town, Cairo, Dakar, Nyon and even at Sundance in Salt Lake City, Utah. Likewise, her collaborative sound art and design have stood out at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda whilst her compositions have been performed in New York, drawn eyes and ears at Cape Town’s (Un)Infecting the City, and in Berlin via the Oscillations project and group exhibition. In 2022, she even drew the prestigious attention of the International Oram Award for feminine-bodied innovators in sound, music and associated technology, who added her to their annual shortlist. In 2023, she was selected for a short residency as a Media and Arts Fellow with the DAAD, Berlin.
The particular standards of intensity, eclecticism and immersiveness which so characterise her work so far stem from her vision of music-making as a kind of audio alchemy.
Photo of Denise Onen by Lorin Sookool