Johanna Monk

I’m Johanna. I do performance art. I make sounds, I play musical instruments. I write stories, poems, essays. I find ways of doing all these things at the same time. Sometimes I organize events, because you can get a lot more done together. I live and work in Rotterdam. I used to live in Canada. I’m told I was born there. Nowadays I like to be known as Johanna and she/her, but it wasn’t like that when I was born.
I have to tell you about Vanita, because nothing of me makes sense without Vanita. We lived and loved and worked together for 35 years. We wrote/published a novel and short stories and plays and poems and zines and comics. We did music and spoken word and art performances. We had exhibitions and curated events and festivals and ran an art/music space. We made short movies and released records. We did experimental psychotherapy on each other and re-lived our childhoods together and made art about that. We did psychedelic drugs and had kinky queer genderbending sex and made art about that. We meditated in cemeteries and hospitals and all-night bars and made art about that.
Vanita died in 2024. What becomes of an artist duo when one of the artists is dead? This has become my main research question. I can’t live in the past. But even when I make something completely new, somehow it’s still a collaboration with her. It’s still about our love and healing and transformation and enlightenment. But it’s also about our traumas and violence and lust and death and politics and all the ridiculous ideas we entertain about ourselves, how we always keep fucking everything up and the absurdity of it all. Because to notice silence, you first need some noise.
So I guess you know a little more about me now.