Matt Lambert wants you to believe in magic again

I have been thinking about it a lot recently, not what love is but what the qualities of love are. It’s a constantly mutable idea. It’s a frequency, a space for communication. Two people can be in another dimensional reality truly. Love is a feeling, a guiding force that pulls you intuitively towards things without knowing why. And at some point, I realised that love was a driving force behind all of this work without knowing why.

I had a friend named Brian Tennessee Claflin who used to do this party at Ficken 3000 with Travis Jeppesen. He was one of the first people I met in the city when I arrived but tragically passed away ten years ago. He told me this story of walking into a darkroom for one of his first times, seeing a man face down, ass up, screaming, ‘If you can reach my heart you can keep it.’ It was always a funny anecdote I told people until I really started to think about it more. Almost every character, person, friend or lover I have been attracted to in my life has been someone who appraisingly shows the world their magic. There are people who are screaming into the void with their hearts wide open, looking for their tribe, looking to be understood, looking to be seen, looking just for someone to grab it.

It's an interesting dance, the showing and the protecting of the heart. I realised that with the book, too. It’s a chapter-based collection of film and video stills as well as behind-the-scenes photography. It's creating an alternate version of the space that allows for characters to open their hearts and let their souls shine. These kinds of moments of unmasking are what I'm looking for intensely. The sexual work, for example, was never really about the sex. It was about the unmasked moments shared between people.

The AIDS crisis changed the fabric of how we exist. It was a big ripple in terms of the ways in which this community is able to support each other, share information and pass along tools. There has always been an unspoken underground communication between queers, ways to survive and hack the system. You see it in Berlin now, it’s as simple as getting your hormones –– ways to exist outside a system that has always rejected you. I guess I'm trying to be a circuit in a broken circuit board.

One of my favorite books right now, Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising, by Liz Rosenfeld and João Florêncio, talks about the importance of understanding the potency of energy in a space. This idea of queer longing. Getting to the core of what these things are and questioning if it is different generations or one thread of energy running through. I started to be less binary about generations, it’s more like a flow of energy. It’s not just information but a way of talking, a way of looking at the world. This has been one of the focuses of Sissy Smut, the series I do at Volksbühne, too. I want the audience to be between 20 and 80+ –– just sharing energy in the room, simple like that.

To listen and to realise that the answers we are looking for are often in front of us. Our bodies and intuition pull us towards things –– to listen to that buzz, that frequency. There's something beautiful about moving manically and chaotically through things, but at some point there have to be moments of slowing down. We're in such a death drive to be so productive. It's such a disgusting capitalised version of how we see our creative output.

In a weird way, I'm more polarised now about Berlin than I've ever been. However, I’m deeply in love with this city, too. When I first came here, I was looking for this radical, political, sexually liberating, queer, punk underground that had something to say. I listen to friends lament about the 90s, but I also remember 15 years ago, coming to the door of clubs and having trans friends, Black friends and femme friends have a terrible time. It felt so disgusting to be out in spaces and enjoying yourself knowing that this is an experience that some people I love the most would not be able to experience with the same breath.

Let's make spaces that are queer and loud and wild and not everybody wants to be in. Make them hyper safe for queers but not hyper palatable for people who don't really understand the necessity of them. Not long ago, there was this PunXnKWeenZ festival at Neue Zukunft, which was one of the most incredible moments I've seen in Berlin in a really long time. It's political. It's magical. It's off the phones and in the room. We make zines. We make shirts. We make films. That is punk to me. Political action through art. Community Building. There is a really exciting moment happening in Berlin in spite of this gentrification destroying so much of what's in the city. Shoutout to Bleach, Nancy, Fibi Eyewalker and many more.

As a director, you often hide behind the screen. You say what you want, then sit back and watch the monitor. That's nice in some ways, but it was important for me to find a language that wasn't about speaking. It was about finding and discovering and letting that literal physical energy radar guide you into an image.

I did a recent shoot with Michèle Lamy for Everything Is Political magazine not long ago when I really started to understand what that meant. To sit and stare at each other in silence to see who breaks first. To make space for that thing in the room with the camera just being a documentarian of that energy we create together. I will be in your proximity and whatever you're feeling, I'm going to feel that with you. To play with awkwardness and silence. To find that moment when you're raw and unmasked, whether it takes five minutes or two hours. To poke around for what's at the core of someone in the moments in between

Hierarchy can destroy magic! I also like to get away from virtual. No WhatsApp groups, no Zooms, just a couple of hours in a room to lock in. I try to offer a vessel for you to play in a way you've never done before, and hopefully you can pull my heart somewhere I've not been before with it. It has to be this mutual stepping into each other's worlds. How can we merge our minds and get to a place where we're both equally in the same thing? That means come with no preconceived notions.

To remain open to magic. It's so easy to close yourself to it right now because everything feels so terrifying. Whatever magic means to you, whether you’re capable of understanding it through art and expression or through words or love –– everyone has their own idea of what that means. Stand for something. Have integrity. Everything is political. It takes time to embody and understand what solidarity really means. It's not an idea, not an Instagram post, but real work. It's physically putting yourself in a room. Guess what? If you're a faggot, if you're a woman, if you're of colour, if you're anything that's not a cis straight white dude, you are politicised by your existence. I'm not going to tell you what to say, just say something.