Mary Katharine Tramontana

When it comes to finding love in Berlin, some advice I've heard rings true. Berlin being the emotionally unavailable, non-committal, avoidant situationship capital of Europe, you’re more likely to find ketamine on the bathroom floor. So when I found a partner with whom I lived through 10 years of life’s ecstasies and agonies, the dissolution of that bond was an ineffable loss.

What range of emotion can you experience in a decade of living with someone? My first New York Times’ byline. My firs...

On a cold, gray Berlin afternoon in February, 1990, a few months after the Wall came down, a group of young artists and anarchists from East Germany climbed through the window of an abandoned department store and began creating their own utopia.
The central Berlin building they occupied became the famous Tacheles squat. Open around the clock, with artist studios, a sculpture garden, movie theater, bar and concert venue, the Tacheles was a tourist destination and symbol of post-reunification B...

Zoë Noble was 32 when her doctor told her “the clock is ticking.”

The hysterectomy Ms. Noble needed to remove a fibroid was not up for discussion so far as her doctor was concerned, despite the fact that she didn’t want children. It took years of pain and an emergency room visit before she was finally granted the surgery at 37.

The practice of a physician denying a patient surgery on the assumption that a woman will change her mind about wanting children is common.

“It’s as though a woman’s p...

BARCELONA, Spain — When Billie Eilish called pornography “a disgrace” in a recent radio interview, the quote made headlines. The Grammy-winning musician said she had started watching at around age 11, to learn how to have sex, and that she was now angry about the way she felt porn misrepresented women.

When people talk about pornography, they’re often referring, like Eilish, to its commercial, heterosexual variety, which is what most of the free porn online tends to be. On those sites, you’d ...

Bullfight-lover. Big game hunter. Deep sea fisher. Brawler. Boxer. Drinker. War hero. Ladies' man. Even for his time, Ernest Hemingway was masculinity in hyperbole. The outsized writer of stripped-back prose was also, a new documentary argues, an explorer of gender fluidity in the bedroom – both in his literature and his life. At a cultural moment which favours simplistic interpretations of iconic figures as villains or heroes, American filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick muddy the waters of...

Homosexuality and heterosexuality do not exist. Your uterus does not belong to you. Feminism must be liberated from the “tyranny” of identity politics. These are just a few tenets from punk trans philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s urgent new collection of essays, An Apartment on Uranus. Part memoir, part theory, and exactly what we need now.

His cult classic Countersexual Manifesto, meanwhile, was hailed as the “most significant theory of the body and power since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble”, ...

Ruby Warrington has never wanted children. Not while she was growing up in England and not later in her life, a commitment that was tested by an unplanned and rare pregnancy — she was using an IUD at the time — when she was 23, shortly after she graduated from the London School of Fashion. She had an abortion.
She moved into magazine journalism af...

Mary Katharine Tramontana’s latest collection of poetry and portraits navigates desire, grief and the taboo of age-gap sexual encounters

American Berlin-based artist Mary Katharine Tramontana has created her debut artbook of poetry and photography, Serious Pleasures. The pocket-sized publication contains “poems of lust and longing”, alongside self-portraits and photos from Boys, a “portrait series of pretty, young men”. Tramontana began the project during a period of intense yet “highly ininventive” grief, mourning the end of a ten-year open relationship with her partner as well as the death

Serious Pleasures

Desire has the power to transform or unravel us – fueling change, self-discovery, or even self-destruction. On Saturday, writer and photographer Mary Katharine Tramontana will be in conversation with sex industry researcher Lex Gillon, as they explore her newly-opened solo photography exhibition and her book Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing. Expect a candid discussion on sexuality, art, and the complexities of desire, accompanied by cocktails and music.

Mary Katharine Tramontana (b. 1982) is a Berlin-based photographer, poet, and writer whose work on sexual politics and art has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Playboy, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She’s collaborated with Reina Sofía, the Spanish Film Archive, WILZIG Museum, Arsenal Institute, and Academy of Arts Berlin. In the past year, she's exhibited internationally at five shows in Miami, Berlin, and Savannah, and given talks on sexuality...

‘Boys ejaculate; girls menstruate.’ That was the gist of the sexual education that she received here in the UK (Warrington is now based in the US). It means that young men learnt about ejaculation and masturbation – in other words, that orgasm and pleasure are a standard part of sex for boys – whereas young women’s sexual education focused on periods and pregnancy prevention. For women, pleasure and the clitoris are often completely left out of the picture, she said.

Pervert icon John Waters once quipped, “I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.” A pervert recovering-Catholic myself, I know what he’s talking about. Prohibition excites. Ban a film and you have a PR wet dream. Ban something inevitable – “impure thoughts,” non-procreative sex, female desire – and you’ll not only make it more appealing, you create a sin-repent cycle that keeps ‘em coming back for over 2000 years. But you don’t need to be raised with religion for sex to...

On the flat, otherworldly, shingle expanse of Dungeness, a headland in southern England, stands a wooden cottage with a small garden. The tar-black cabin with its canary-yellow trim is surrounded by rambling flowers and driftwood totems bedecked with sun-bleached crab claws and snail shells: a quaint scene thrown off-kilter by a nuclear power plant that looms in the background.

The house, called Prospect Cottage, was home to the British fi...

Collaborative Work and the Gaze of the Compound Eye

Over the course of three days, 25 participants, staff members of silent green and the Arsenal, as well as invited guests, will explore topics at the interface of theory and practice.

Long-time friends and collaborators of Derek Jarman – costume designer Annie Symons, artist Peter Fillingham, photographer Howard Sooley, filmmaker David Lewis, composer Simon Fisher Turner, and producer and curator James Mackay, supported by Mary Katharine Tramontana, writer and poet and Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe, curator and writer – will talk about Jarman's