Selected Happenings

Selected Projects

Shifting Power in the Informal Economy

2025

With the support of:
Interledger Foundation
MigLAB Ug
Ban Ying e.V.
Migrant*innen für Menschenwürdige Arbeit*
Asociación Rumiñahui
Local anonymous activists in Madrid

Shifting Power in the Informal Economy is a research and advocacy initiative that critically examines the nature, structure, and community understandings of informal economies within Europe, particularly through ethnographic insights and stakeholder mappings from Berlin and Madrid. Challenging conventional assumptions about their scale, visibility, and composition, the project reveals how migrant labor, platform precarity, and translocal networks redefine economic informality beyond traditional metrics. It develops from financial inclusion toward structural financial justice, exploring open payment protocols, data sovereignty tools, and workers-led mechanisms to empower precarious gig and informal workers against platform extraction.

[Publications in Progress]

Often Participatory, Collaborative, and Research-based...

Emotional Futures

2023

Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation.

Emotional Futures is produced by IRL, a gaming collective under the distributed artistic direction of Marcel Darienzo, Carina Erdmann, Steph Holl-Trieu, Andrew Pasquier, Xiaoji Song, Moritz Tontsch and Ingeborg Wie Henriksen.

Emotional Futures is a web-based game that invites players to invest in their emotional future through interactions with friends. After each exchange, players evaluate their emotional output, turning them into liquid currencies: Blood, Sweat and Tears. These feed each player's unique Emoxy — an alchemical virtual creature that evolves with every level. The Emoxy accompanies players on their journey, inviting them to continue investing in their own growth while at the same time questioning the game’s logic. This situates the game in critical proximity to self-improvement apps (like mindfulness or wellbeing applications) that measure and gamify personal development. The more players interact with Emotional Futures, the more they are encouraged to reflect on the ways in which technologies are used to manipulate and monetise their emotions.

The Parallel Society

2023

The Parallel Society is a cyberdrama and poetic intervention in the form of a video installation.

The Parallel Society is based on participatory artistic research on the emotional synergies in relation to money, financial systems, and economic injustice experienced by rural residents and diasporic communities.

Alien without Extraordinary Ability

2020-2025

With the support of:
University of the Underground
Asian Performing Artist Lab
School of Dissident Friendship

Research output realized through research residency at New Politics and Afrofuturism Programme at University of the Underground, guided by Nelly Ben Hayoun and Magid Magid.

Alien without Extraordinary Ability is a research-based board game prototype related to migration and labor practices: on different visa systems, bordering practices related to labor, and how skills and abilities are being evaluated and calculated. The game narrative is set in a factory, and creates two competing incentive structures that motivates the players to choose on which games they wish to follow. The game particularly references the mechanisms lie behind the matrix of quantification through techno-governance tools in border regimes, and creates pathways for media and policy practitioners to reflect on the systemic injustice in such system.

Alien without Extraordinary Ability was later developed as multiple versions of performances, and also submitted to Hawthorn Archive.

Rhythm of Super-Diversity

2019

With the Support of:
Open Set Lab

This project was part of my residency at Open Set, as a research output, I gave a presentation during the symposium On the Practice of Tuning-in at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam about the theoretical framework I developed within my research project Rhythm of Super-diversity.

Xiaoji Song (she/they, 1995) is berlin-based artist, activist, and researcher, working to build alternative infrastructure and imaginaries concerning migration, labor, and technology.

Say hi!

Instagram

@ciao_ciao_ciao_ciao_net

Say hi to me!

selected radio/podcasts

Beyond Currency: Reimagining Money and Digital Futures, in conversation with FinTech strategist Sarah Habib and theatermaker Anuja Ghosalkar, Interledger Salon, 2025

Interview with Dr. Florian Wagner (1): History of Colonial Internationalsm, Worldwide FM (Archived), 2021

Border? Border! A Letter to 2050 (I), in conversation with Adnan Arif and Eduardo Castillo-Vinuesa, Worldwide FM, 2021

love:

Comradeship
Sidewalks
My hometown Wuhan
Old internet
Cooperative structures
Autumn

selected writings

Translocal Workers for Economic Justice, European Alternatives Journal Issue 12, December 2025

Dreaming Feminist Economy, Arbeit Umformen – Intersektionale Einblicke auf Arbeit und Arbeitsmarkt, BIWOC* Rising, 2024

hate:

Border violence
Farewell
Hot summer
Capitalism
Group bigger than 5 and smaller than 50

Cities I have lived in:

Most of people do not know most of them, but in total 10 cities or villages.

My small town and rural experiences shaped my understanding of center and periphery.

Random jobs I have done:

To make a living & live, I have also worked with research institute, big tech, bubble tea shop, small AI startup, hotpot restaurant, think tank, English teaching&learning platform as waitress, bubble tea maker, tutor, assistant, communication specialist, intern...these experiences have informed their practices.

other selected public work

2025 Workshop: Building the Policy Engines for Alternative Migration Regimes, Salzburg Center for European Union Studies, Salzburg, Austria

2025 Workshop: EXPLORING OUR COMMON GROUNDS: for Pan-Asian Solidarity & Beyond, as part of Rice Complex Collective, BIWOC*Rising, Berlin, Germany

2024 Panel Talk: Financial Inclusion for Undocumented Communities: From Strategies to Practices, moderated by Xiaoji Song, speakers: Malou Lintmeijer, Savannah Koolen, and Eunice de Asis, Stichting Here to Support; Daphnee Prates Iglesias, UN-IGF; Sarah Habib, independent FinTech Strategist, Interledger Summit 2024

2023 Performance "Alien without Extraordinary Ability", as part of APAL AmnAsia residency presentation, Berliner Ringtheater, Berlin, GERMANY

2021 Participation of Group Show "New Politics and Afrofuturism", for the game “Alien without Extraordinary Ability”, University of the Underground, online

2020 Participation of Group Exhibition "Mapping the Rural Soundscape", participating artist, Goethe Institute, BULGARIA

2020 Participation of Group Exhibition "Spectrum Scene Y", participating artist, Sofia Art Week 2020, Goethe Institute, BULGARIA

2020 Workshop: Digital and Media Literacy Workshop for Elderly Migrants: Understanding Modern Media, supported by Wir Sind Paten Erfurt, GERMANY

2016 Documentary Theater: HOME AGAIN, co-producer, researcher, writer, performer, Thiemeloods Nijmegen, NETHERLANDS

Last Updated 29.01.2026

Brews, Bubbles, Broth, and Much, Much More

2025, performance-lecture, 20 minutes

© Photo: Dirk Rose / PACT Zollverein

As a part of:
PACT Atelier 71
@PACT ZOLLVEREIN

Brews, Bubbles, Broth, and Much, Much More is a participatory performance-lecture on aromatic fluidity, invisible labour, and the concept of hospitality under colonial continuities and global capitalism.

From Financial Inclusion to Financial Justice: How to Enable an Equitable Future in the Gig Economy

2025, workshop, 90-minutes

Invited collaborators:
Aju John
Berlin-based Labour Organiser, Researcher, Lawyer;

Mariana Jiménez Hernández
Mexican labor lawyer, activist, and co-founder of Laboralista de Confianza.

As a part of:
Learning Together Lab
@Interledger Summit 2025 Mexico City

What would a fair financial future look like for a precarious delivery driver? What enables it, and how do open payments contribute?

Gig platforms sustain millions of low-income workers amid irregular hours, volatile pay, no benefits, and weak protections—exacerbated by poor financial access.

This workshop starts from these inequalities to re-imagine strategies for platform economies: beyond inclusion, toward financial justice.

In Theater, Conferences, Gardens...
Negotiation Tables, Streets, and Homes...

Social Clinics for Migrant Workers

2025, Events

With support of:

Local anonymous queersfeminist organizers <3

@PACT WerkStadt

In these series of events, we invite everyone to

(1).
Celebrate the “unproductivity” as a form of care.

(2).
Use soup as a medium to create space for rest, exchange, and rethinking our relationship with time.

(3)
Join a series of ti shaing & bodily exercises to perform "Touching fish," derived from the Chinese phrase mō yú (摸鱼), a slang term for slacking off at work or in school.

Alien without Extraordinary Ability

2025, Participatory Performance, 45 minutes

Credits:

Artistic Direction & Concept: EAST ALIEN COMPANY
Technical Direction & Multimedia Design: Yve Oh
Text & Dramaturgy: Xiaoji Song Performance & AI Prompting: Yumo Cheng

Cast: Yumo Cheng Xiaoji Song Yve Oh (voice)

© Photo: Jacney Chen

As a part of
100° Diaspora, Performing Exiles Festival @Berliner Festspiele

Alien without Extraordinary Ability (2025, 45 minutes) is a performance that interrogates the sentimental politics of (non)belonging, migration, and (in)voluntary desire through the lens of an East Alien, who performs the role of an East Asian on earth.

Through autofictional reading, chewing, playing, and dancing, Alien without Extraordinary Ability is a double critique on both authoritarian and liberal violence, and a manifesto on the spatial and temporal effects of migration and labour practices, and how these effects are scrutinized under the sentimental gaze.

With Communities, Comrades, Friends...

~~People I disagree with, Lovers, Exiled, Migrants,~~

Aliens, Queers, Moms, Interns...

As part of:
Climate Migration Soft Observatory @Matadero Madrid Contemporary Art Center

Lake Reclamation Code is a participatory performance on aliens, lakes, and empires. Through tracing the political history related to four phases of land reclamation in the city of Wuhan and the neoliberal imaginaires contructed in those historic snippets, the performance uses speculation and rule-based horrors to open up friction and fiction of more-than-human solidarity.

Fluid Safety

2023, Workshop

As part of:
URBANCONFEST 2023 @CISR Berlin

Fluid Safety is a game-based workshop targeting local stakeholders on urban safety such as sociologists, urban planners, architects, activists, and other concerned citizens, to collectively explore the concepts of safety, as well as the perceived sense of safety in the urban mobility process.

Karaoke Against Censorship

2023, Event

Baynatna, the Arabic Library in Berlin, was upported by EVZ Foundation and the Federal Foreign Office of Germany in the context of international lab “Urban Citizenship in Transition” by CISR Berlin.

As an open karaoke format, Karaoke Against Censorship wishes to promote productive urban friction through collective singing and dialoguing in open spaces. By singing together different censored songs, the event aims to create visibility for the struggles of migrants who have lived or are still now living under censorship, and create space to foster transnational solidarity among dissidents from different contexts and backgrounds.