Overview

⏱️Schedule:  Doors 18:30 → Talk 19:00→ Q&A → Mingle
🌐Language: English

We laugh at memes, in meetings, at things that are harmless and things that are horrifying. We laugh alone at our phones and together in rooms. But what is laughter actually doing to us – and for us – in a world that often feels absurd?

“Yet We Laugh” is a 45-minute lecture-performance in which a narrator tries – and repeatedly fails – to pin down what laughter and humour might mean to a human being. Through spoken text, sound and staged actions, the piece invites the audience to sit inside humour as a complex embodied and cultural phenomenon, rather than just something “funny” that happens on top of life.

Along the way, we also meet a machine that is trying to learn how to laugh. As it stutters through giggles and glitches, the performance opens up questions about psychology, attention, and how theory can be performed on stage to show the entanglement between humans, language, objects and technology.

This isn’t a “how to be funny” workshop – it’s a live experiment: what does our laughter reveal about us, and whose purposes does it serve?

Together, we’ll explore

• Laughter as interruption  - How laughter shows up as an embodied response that disrupts reasoning and language – and why that disruption matters.

• Humour that doesn’t translate - Why humour is so hard to define across cultures, contexts and situations, and what gets lost (or revealed) when jokes fail.

• Laughter as something we do together - Echo, complicity and collective attention: what happens when we laugh in a room, and what kinds of social bonds or tensions that creates.

• Lecture meets performance, human meets machine - How combining spoken theory, sound and staged actions – plus a machine learning to “laugh” – can make abstract ideas suddenly tangible.

• The politics of absurdity - If laughter interrupts reasoning, what kind of knowledge does it still produce, and for whom? When absurdity becomes a mode of power, does laughter resist it – or help it circulate?

Expect an evening that’s somewhere between performance art, philosophy and stand-up seen from the side: sometimes funny, sometimes uncomfortable, always asking what our laughter is really doing.

Speaker

Gabriel Lemos

Artist, composer, educator

Gabriel Lemos is a Berlin-based artist, composer and educator from Brazil whose work weaves sound, language and technology across video, performance, installation and text. He is deeply engaged with knowledge systems and their role in artistic processes, often working with embodied and site-responsive practices. An amateur mycologist, he is passionate about fungi, ecological entanglements and network thinking, regularly integrating foraging, walking and the philosophy of attention as poetic, speculative and pedagogical gestures. With a background in education and artistic research, he approaches creative work as a space for shared inquiry, autonomy and experimentation. 

Location