“The Care Gap” — Sex, Pleasure and Community-based Care

Panel- 18+ and older.

Care for our sexual lives comes from different places. It happens on dancefloors and in darkrooms, in peer networks and group chats, through the friend who knows which clinic won’t judge you and the stranger who checks you’re okay at 5am. That web of care matters more as austerity cuts into public health, the system retreats or falters, and the market steps in, selling pleasure, wellness and testing back to us as products and brands: some genuinely useful, many out of reach for the people who need them most.

Part panel, part knowledge share. Practitioners working inside the medical system and well beyond it pass on what they’ve learned about looking after our sexual lives: where the gaps are, how services actually work today, and what to do when the official route doesn’t.

We’ll talk about the care that happens in between: harm reduction and nightlife interventions, consent work and awareness-raising, peer-led support by and for sex workers, and the psychosocial care the system rarely pays for. Together we’ll ask what counts as care, who gets to define it, who pays for it (and profits from it), and what community-led care that makes room for pleasure, mental health and wellbeing should look like.

With
Martin* (IG: @letstalkabobutsexanddrugs) - If Dr. Martin is not on the road as a social worker, medical or teacher, than he is out and about on his velo, sitting with coffee reading newspaper (FAZ, Republik) or dancing to down beat music.

Madi Awadalla (IG: @3awadalla · awadalla.info) – Madi Awadalla is an Egypt-born writer, educator, and transdisciplinary artist whose practice combines text, performance, and film. Their work challenges established ways of knowing through embodied research and archival intervention, exploring how power shapes the ways we live, desire, remember, and understand the world. Engaging with intimacy, contradiction, care, and the unruly lives that escape official narratives, Awadalla opens up new ways of experiencing and imagining the world. Through participatory and liberatory pedagogical practices, they bring critical perspectives on medicine, healing, and colonial legacies into public spaces.