Sawangwongse Yawnghwe with Jonathan Lemke

Notes from the Aboveground is a collaborative performance by Sawangwongse Yawnghwe and Jonathan Lemke, emerging from the project The Joker’s Headquarter. The piece takes Fjodor Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from the Underground (1864) as a conceptual foil—reading it not as a document of the 19th century, but as a lens through which to view the fractured psyche of the contemporary, socially withdrawn subject. Referencing a figure who retreats from public life into anonymous spheres, the performance stages a dialogue in the mode of stand-up-comedy, in which tenderness and aggression coalesce.

What begins as an attempt at connection becomes increasingly erratic, shaped by the search for a language adequate to both inner compulsion and social failure. Oscillating between staged intimacy and calculated exposure, Notes from the Aboveground explores the joke as a fragile rhetorical tool—an unstable compound of laughter and violence, strategy, and collapse. Rather than catharsis, the performance offers a mode of inhabiting contradiction: a space in which social ghosts speak in borrowed voices.

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, *1971, Na Lek Village, Burma. Places of belonging: Europe: Netherlands, Italy; Asia: Shan State, Chiang Mai; Canada. Affinity: Yawnghwe Office in Exile. Book: The Disasters of Military Rule in Burma, 2007/08.

Jonathan Lemke, *1987 in Hamburg, Germany. Places of belonging: Berlin.