NEXT 

Soft as Ash is a video work suspended between poetry, body, and sound. An autobiographical field where memory settles in the flesh — “Soft like ash“: ephemeral, unstable; dense with what cannot fully surface. “Heavy like unsaid things “— what is silenced, and what we are taught not to speak by family, society, and the structures around us. A continuous autobiographical poem runs beneath the images like a pulse the film follows and inhabits, expanding toward a shared biography.It guides what can be spoken and what remains fragmented. Meaning surfaces in particles: breath, gesture, residue, echo.

A mothers scream cracking open the sky, the sound of being wrong before anyone asked who i was. they said girl / like a warning // like a contract signed in blood, I also came in listening, fluent in shadows, already carrying stories I hadn’t lived yet — the accumulated histories of women who were silenced, harmed, controlled, and still endured. A body entering a world where violence against women is structural, daily, normalized - a collective memory lodged in the flesh.

Seven diverse women inhabit the work.

From this point of arrival, the film moves through residues rather than events. A question in fragments:

Is this mine? This blood, this tear, this silent scream, these broken fingernails — or the evidence of a system built on women’s pain? A tightening. A pressure. A voice denied exit. The body forced to abandon itself to stay alive. Memory fractures into skin, bone, breath — not only private trauma, but political history carried in the flesh of those taught to remain quiet.

Within this current, the voice of Mad Kate appears in echoes — fragile, sometimes exhausted, moving between uncertainty and desperation. Still, it persists. It hardens into refusal, into rhythm, into a force that will not be quieted. What trembles begins to strike; what falters returns louder. A voice not only surviving, but pushing back against disappearance. The sonic landscape shifts with her: from suspended, ethereal textures to ruptures of punk, raw and percussive. Sound fractures, reforms, holds, releases. Voice becomes atmosphere; atmosphere becomes resistance.

Nature, bodies, language, and sound seep into one another. Water carries traces; air disperses them. Against this atmosphere of rupture, the work searches for proximity: a fragile re-threading of connection, a tenuous sense of sisterhood, a shared breath that persists despite fracture. Images of impact and images of care coexist — not as resolution, but as possibility.

The poem gradually shifts from an autobiographical “I” into a collective, political body. The voice dissolves singular identity and becomes porous, formed through many lives, genders, and social positions. By naming the trembling child, the sex worker, the too-soft boy, the crying man, the text refuses fixed categories and constructs a relational self. 

Vulnerability becomes connective tissue: trembling, grief, endurance, and survival are shared conditions rather than private failures. The speaking voice becomes a site where these exclusions gather and reassemble.In this sense, the poem performs a politics of identification that is not based on sameness but on shared exposure to violence, marginalization, and care.

“Stitched together in the dark” — a community formed outside institutional recognition. The final lines push toward futurity. Soft as Ash speaks lingers in the interval after rupture, where grief and tenderness coexist, and where a fragile language of relation and becoming begins to gather — Soft as Ash, persistent as what remains.

Concept, Writer, Co-Director, Editor: Hanna Schaich

Co-Director, Choreography: Federica Dauri 

Director of Photography: Claudia Sicuranza

Performers: Jamila Bashir Abduhalli, Diva Conte, Caterina Genta, Martina Gabrielli, Agnesa Trippa, Miss Aneris, Federica Dauri

Sound Design and original composition: Mad Kate 

Music Selection:

1. Mad Kate / the Tide - Golden Voice 

2. Mad Kate / the Tide - This Morning Waking

3. Jacopo Bertacco - Universe Reprise

4. Mad Kate / the Tide - Geraldine

5. Mad Kate / the Tide - Your Words

6. Mad Kate / the Tide - Exactitudes of Our Passion

7. Mad Kate / the Tide - My Father and the Nature of the Universe

Mad Kate / the Tide are Jacopo Bertacco and Kathryn Fischer aka Mad Kate

WITH THE SUPPORT OF

Berliner Senat Videokünstlerinnenprogramm, 5x5 Go Stipendium, Land Vorarlberg