Lightning Strikes

With lightning strikes, Rosa Wernecke and Paula Haeni explore flashes and glitches in sound and image through a performance shaped by fog and fine mist. The audience is invited into a world that hums and rumbles, flickers and glows, erupts and burns. Where sound fractures, light bursts, and artistic disciplines merge into a shared language, the two artists transform glitches into lightning—sudden moments of illumination.
Within these storms of flashes and electrical interference, the performance approaches queer desire as a lightning strike: a moment of potential and an indication of connections that appear only briefly before disappearing again. As the air crackles with tension, lightning traces an electrifying longing for relationships that have always existed, exist now, and will continue to exist.
In this sense, becoming lightning means refusing to simply accept normative systems. Instead, it means inhabiting the glitch, the error, the disruption—persistently striking at the boundaries of these systems and opening up spaces for other ways of connecting, perceiving, and becoming.
Sound: Paula Haeni
Visuals: Rosa Wernecke
Premiered 2025 at Fleckl Festival Reitschule Bern