luhmen d’arc
Label founded in Berlin in 2013 by Matís d’Arc and Klara Luhmen that produces workshops, performances, lectures, jams and play parties around intimacy, sexuality and BDSM.
luhmen d’arc is an event label rather than a fixed venue. Matís d’Arc, its founder and managing director, created it with Klara Luhmen in Berlin in 2013 to design and stage workshops, performances, lectures, jams and play parties. Its about page frames the work around intimacy, desire and sexuality approached in a playful and experimental way, and argues that alternative forms of encounter can work as empowerment in a society shaped by narrow ideas of what sexuality is.
Founder
According to the label’s biography, Matís studied literature and worked in contemporary music and dance theater, which took him from Munich to Argentina and, in 2010, to Berlin. There he discovered rope and BDSM in the fetish and queer-kink scene and found an experiential home at Felix Ruckert‘s Schwelle7. Since 2016 he has lived and worked in Zurich and Berlin. Besides organizing, he describes himself as a seminar leader, coach and occasional performer.
Rope in Zurich
Rope is one strand of a broader program. In Zurich the label runs the Bondage Jam Zürich at the bodywork studio Serrat(u)s: open, unstructured Sunday rope jams, a newbie intro on alternating dates, FLINTA and queer jams, a one-day Intro Day for beginners and weekend workshops on floor work and partial suspension. Jams are held in German and English, and tickets use a sliding scale with reduced prices for people on low incomes and higher supporter prices. Its events are billed as being by iridescent matters.
Team
The team page lists a wide circle of facilitators in Zurich, Berlin, Basel and other cities, most of them working in massage, breathwork, tantra, dance or performance. Rope teachers among them include the Basel rigger RopuNawa, who started out with the Osada-ryū style that Osada Steve taught in Switzerland before drawing on other teachers, and the Brussels teacher A-Nicolas, who lived in Japan for four years and studied rope with Arisue Go. The label’s calendar also includes events that are not about rope, such as tantra-massage workshops in Karlsruhe.