Abjectified Project (NO) 2025-2026
The artists in Abjectified Project have performed together in different constellations in more or less planned drag art environments since 2018. What they all have in common is a solid drag performance practice and a love of repulsive aesthetics, namely the abject. The Abjectified Shows initiated by Peter David Ramthun and co-produced by Jens Martin Arvesen and Open Drag Stage Oslo are the direct precursor to this collective. By taking theory from medicine, sociology, psychology and linguistics, they explore how the abject has the power to make us better equipped to deal with our own emotions, better suited to spot unfairness and exclusionary practices, better listeners and better human beings.
Parcitipating artists
Åshild Løvvig (NO)
Åshild Løvvig (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist with a BA in Acting, focused on storytelling and performance art, and an MA in Linguistics, focused on embodied cognition and acting as a possible language learning tool. She is currently the most experienced in Norway on the expression of drag king and masculine drag art. Her work explores fluidity of gender, expression, and meaning, blending academics, cinematic influences, storytelling and the queer arts, utilising these to navigate the intersection of language, identity, theatre and drag. She has been partaking in a small movement of experimental drag in Norway, exploring the abject, where Åshild’s main focus are genres/expressions as draglesque, drag thing, post-humanism, critical takes on the (cis)feminine identity and queer intersectionality. She has also a deep interest in neurodiversity and inclusion of disability in the arts, and how the able-bodied, neurotypical experience dictates concepts like “quality” and “beauty”.
Katinka Steensgaard (NO)
Katinka Steensgaard (she/her) has a background in drama and theatre with a bachelor and master’s degree in applied drama and theatre studies from Oslo Met in Norway. She wrote her master’s thesis about the drag king expression, and aesthetic experiences when exploring masculinity. She has worked as a theatre pedagogue, instructor and as an actor and drag artist. Since 2013 she has been active within the drag field in Norway and been a part of developing the field further. Some project mentions are Open Drag Stage, BOIS Workzone, Oslo Drag Festival and Oslo Dragskole.
She is inspired by underground expressions, such as the club kid tradition and abject theory and practices.
Sofie Bøttger Bratberg (NO)
Sofie Bøttger Bratberg (she/her) is a performing artist who works with drag, movement, voice, and text to explore the diversity of gender and sexuality. She is particularly interested in the gender-neutral – whether that means a blend of genders or a genderless vacuum. In the fall of 2025, Sofie will begin her final year of a bachelor’s degree in screenwriting and plans to write her thesis script on the lesbian heritage. She has been working with drag as an art form for seven years, a practice that deeply informs her writing. Creating queer art for children and young audiences is something very close to Sofie’s heart. Together with Katinka Steensgaard and Remi Johansen Hovda, she wrote, directed, and performed in the plays PrinsHen and the Vanishing Colours and PrinsHen and the Curse of the Nidhuggeren during Oslo MiniPride in 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Jens Martin Hartvedt Arvesen (NO)
Jens Martin (they/them) has worked with several different art media, mostly with drag, dance, and DJing, since 2013. Jens Martin now works freelance as a performance artist and project initiator. They are an educated dancer from KHiO.
They have been focused on creating spaces for queer performance art, and raising awareness, and articulating with words, underrepresented aesthetics in queer tradition through teaching and exemplification. They linked the term “Abject” together with Drag’s term “Filth” in the drag performance seminar “Becoming the Abject” in 2020. Recently, contemporary romantic ideals have increasingly infiltrated their art, while they have shifted focus from production and facilitation to creation and process. Jens Martin wishes to move towards creating art that to the greatest extent possible consists of homemade material and is currently working in a landscape consisting of movement, text, visual media and performative presence.
Peter David Ramthun (NO)
Peter David Ramthun (he/him) is both a drag artist and a nurse. He has contributed to abject discourse in Norway through initiating the show series “Abjectified” in 2023 and 2024, which is the direct precursor to this collective. Peter has, through his work as a nurse, experienced several professional fields where he has become familiar with bodily functions and fluids, gained insight into how organ failure affects the rest of the body, and how the medical balance of health works. For the past 7 years, he has worked with drag and stage performance, incorporating his knowledge of the body, anatomy, and medicine, and delved into questions about what “beauty” is and the boundary between the aesthetically pleasing and challenging, as well as using the technique of camp, taken from queer drag art.
Taken residency at
Davvi – Centre for Performing Arts
Davvi – Centre for Performing Arts is a hub and a gathering point in Northern Norway for the professional independent Performing Arts community. The organization is a laboratory for new ideas, artistic research, and an open space where different cultures are cared for. We challenge hegemonic thinking and support cross-sectorial artistic working and thinking. We are staff of 11 curios people, we are placed in Hammerfest, Tromsø and Bodø and we are a space that offers residency, laboratories and producer services.
HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts
HELLERAU acts as an interdisciplinary and international centre for dance, performance, music, theatre and media arts. It offers spaces for productions, festivals, concerts performances, exhibitions and discourse, cooperates with various regional cultural partners and is firmly connected internationally. An important part of HELLERAU is a residency program, which offers opportunities for artistic research, networks, production and encounters throughout the whole year.
INITIUM
Foundation INITIUM is a production platform for contemporary art and culture projects. At INITIUM, our mission is to facilitate community development through the transformative power of arts and culture. We collaborate with communities to create and develop innovative theatre productions and art projects that reflect their unique stories, perspectives and experiences. Through these collaborative endeavours, we strive to promote social change and inspire a more inclusive and vibrant society.
Who is Abjectified Project?
All five of us work with Drag, play with gender, queerness, and performance art. Some of us explore the Drag discipline within academic contexts. It started as a series of Drag shows in Oslo initiated by two of the group members: Jens Martin (Brødskive) and Peter (Eliza Fierce). The project explores the abject, so-called repulsive aesthetics, and examined the taking back of what is rejected, claimed as bad, ugly, disgusting. Often, what is considered repulsive within discourse and theory is directly linked to queerness and queer culture. This means that our language and thinking today, very much ties queerness and the repulsive together. We all share a deep interest in the repulsive, and to us these dualities are a huge inspiration.
Photo credit: Malthe Nyvoll
What led you to join Moving Identities?
We want to give a shout out to another Drag persona, Rune Hennum Nilsen aka Lady Die that tipped Åshild aka Grimscribe / Briar the VaudeVillain to apply. We had already started a process of transforming Abjectified into a bigger project intended for fall 2026, and we wanted to reach out to the rest of the group. Then the open call found us first, seemingly perfectly fit for a narrow, weird project like ours.
We hope to be able to present a processual show fall 2026, but we know that we have a lot to figure out by then. And we are so lucky to have that luxury.
Photo credit: Malthe Nyvoll
What is the project you are working on in your residencies?
We focus on what is in ancient esoteric theory described as the four humours: blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile. The two last ones don’t really exist, and these theories could also be said to be outdated – well, pure fiction. But from about the year 1000 BCE untill the 1800’s, the humours became a ‘theory about everything’, a seductive mix of hard sciences and soft sciences, primarily used within medicine. Physical and mental health meant balance between the four liquids. For example, melancholy was believed to be caused by “too much black bile”. And having good blood meant being cheerful, amorous, and optimistic. Considering these ideas were used for thousands of years, it has impacted European culture on a substantial level: our language, the way we think about personality, temperament. And perhaps worse: it puts the responsibility on the individual person based on your emotions. We will research deeply and play with this theme, and experiment with materials, like slime, and try out special makeup effects. Liquid latex … and who knows.
Photo credit: Malthe Nyvoll
What motivates or excites you most about being part of the Moving Identities programme?
The way the programme is organized allows each and one of us to take time off, research, and set everything else on hold for more than half a year. This is nothing but a unique and privileged situation, and we feel so lucky being able to just focus. Besides: Being able to join three different residencies is nothing but a gift. The environment and climate of each place will directly and indirectly shape how we process. Some of us have never been part of a residency or have had the facilities and apparatus a programme like this offers. At the same time, the responsibility following the trust we’re given, is a bit nerve wrecking. But most of all, we’re looking forward to these months – it is just so much fun doing research. It’s fantastic.
Photo credit: Malthe Nyvoll
What change would you like to see in the European performing arts world?
Haha, that is a large question! We hope for less self-censorship, for less fear of going outside the traditions of beauty, or beyond genres for that matter. As for the topic – abjectified – it is about embracing the aesthetically freaky, strange, uncanny, uncomfortable, or ‘ugly’ and breaking the beauty hierarchy! We are governed a lot more by norms than we are aware of, even within genres such as Drag and Burlesque, or what’s considered queer. We long for more diversity, process, and ugliness – and that different aesthetics can be valued and appreciated. Most of society is still favours “strong, healthy bodies and educated minds”. Success is something that is constantly measured and quantified … “The national theatre is better than the independent local theatre.” – No! We need different parameters for different measurements!
Photo credit: Malthe Nyvoll
From their residency at Davvi
Photo credit: Malthe Nyvoll
From their residency at Davvi
Photo credit: Malthe Nyvoll
