Magazine #26 of the Federal Cultural Foundation / Kulturstiftung des Bundes

Spring / Summer 2016

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Delaine Le Bas, born in 1965 in Worthing, Great Britain The artist Delaine Le Bas, a native of southern England and member of the minority of Romany Travellers in Great Britain, explores themes of exclusion and discrimination in her artwork. Her media- and large-scale spatial installations, as well as smaller pieces like drawings and detailed textile works, tend to elicit the feeling of being under siege. She alludes to childhood memories and current circumstances, as well as such topics as shamanism, historical events or – as in her most recent work “Medea Romnja” (Thessaloniki 2015) – ancient Greek mythology. The desire for belonging and spiritual security is reflected in frequently distorted childhood images or an ironic take on the English “home sweet home”.

There's always a sense of apprehension in her works which she attributes to the "politics of fear". And indeed, all of her works have a political bent, displaying graffiti-­ like statements such as “Don’t tell me who I am”, “History Repeats Itself?” and “Gypsy Power”. Yet beyond their active impact on the Roma emancipation movement, her works possess a universal human significance.

There is a special intimacy about Le Bas’s art with her charismatic live and videotaped performances, staged photos, self-made costumes and her own silhouettes.

Her body, her vulnerable and finite being, becomes both the venue and active subject of politics. With installations like “Safe European Home?”, which she jointly developed with her husband, the artist Damian Le Bas, she tries to establish contact with her audience in public space. Performances like “Crystal Ball Genocide”, which she staged at the deserted construction site for the “Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under the National Socialist Regime” at the Berlin Tiergarten in 2012, uniquely combine her “artivism” with the profound experience of her artistic world. There is a very particular urgency in Delaine Le Bas’s works which evoke fundamental questions on such themes as national and minority affiliation, gender politics and racism.

Delaine Le Bas studied at Central Saint Martins College in London. In recent years, her works have been featured at art festivals around the world, including the Venice Biennale in 2007, the Gwangju Biennale (Korea) in 2012, the Prague Biennale in 2005 and 2007, and exhibitions in Poland, Canada, the United States and Great Britain. Le Bas is represented in Germany by the Berlin gallery Kai Dikhas, the first gallery of Sinti and Roma contemporary art. Delaine Le Bas is one of the most outstanding artistic figures of this minority.

Moritz Pankok

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Editorial

Content

New Projects

For those who missed having articles to read in our last edition, this issue will surely make up for it. As always our Magazine features current projects in our funding programme, and this time we begin by turning our attention to the RomArchive and related projects which highlight the culture of the Sinti and Roma. Manuel Gogos asked international artists and cultural producers how they respond to clichés and how they view the controversy surrounding the self-assertion of this discriminated ethnic group. Do they wish to be defined as Roma who are also artists, or rather as artists who just happen to be Roma? (p. 18) The literary texts by the Serbian native and resident of Cologne Jovan Nikolić offer a possible answer to this question. (p. 22)

The Handreader’s Tale Alternative narratives by the Sinti and Roma in the arts and sciences p. 18

The National Socialist Genocide of the Sinti and Roma Rajasthan Mindj Panther globale° – Festival for Cross-Border Literature 2016 Des­integration STADTLAND: Church Ellen Cantor Franz Marc – The Tower of Blue Horses Sticky Messages Heiner Goebbels. The Human Province Human Possibility

Following hard at the heels of the Theatertreffen, another of our funded cultural institutions of excellence will open its doors in June. This year marks the latest edition of the Berlin Biennale. And as always, with the grand opening approaching, Berlin is abuzz with rumours and speculation regarding its programme. Gregor Quack was able to get Lauren Boyle, one of the four curators of the 9th Berlin Biennale, to reveal the fundamental ideas ­behind the international art show and her New York ­perspective on Berlin. The third cultural institution of excellence is the Dance Congress, which takes place every three years and will be staged in Hannover this year. It will open with a specially developed production by the internationally acclaimed French choreographer Boris Charmatz, whom Margarita Tsomou interviewed for this issue of our Magazine. (p. 40)

The Work of Birds

by Marica Bodrožić An Assessment of Father’s Integration

by Nicol Ljubić From Literary Scholar to Telepath

by Marjana ­Gaponenko p. 27

Almost every literature festival nowadays is targeted at an international audience. And so too the globale° festival taking place in Bremen and the surrounding region which specialises in presenting German writers whose native language is not German. We asked three of the participating writers how one can understand and make oneself understandable beyond language and cultural barriers. Marica Bodrožić, Nicol Ljubić (both from former Yugoslavia) and Marjana Gaponenko (from Ukraine) offered us very different, very personal and very original, literary responses. (p. 27–30)

Poems by Sirka Elspaß and Christiane Heidrich p. 39/45

In these times of migration, globalisation and pluralisation, “identity” has become a central concept of cultural self-determination. What is the current state of Jewish cultural identity, particularly when drawing comparisons between Jews who have immigrated to Germany from countries around the world and those who have recently decided to move to Berlin from Israel? We asked members of the young generation what it means to be Jewish in Germany, a country which puts store in its culture of remembrance. (S. 31) And finally, the cultural scholar Kenneth Anders writes about the reinterpretation of the country as “landscape” when viewed from the eyes of urban dwellers. (p. 43) A fundamental and highly insightful piece for all those who are impacted by transformation processes in rural regions and who wish to shape them, as we hope to do with our new TRAFO programme.

On page 39 and 45, we introduce you to two astoundingly young poets, Sirka Elspaß and Christiane Heidrich.

Both participated in a poetry network not long ago, titled “babelsprech” which was funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation. As their poems have not yet been translated, we present them here in their original German language.

This may be the first time you’ve heard of them, but it certainly won’t be the last.

Hortensia Völckers, Alexander Farenholtz Executive committee of the German Federal Cultural ­Foundation

The Swing. In memory of my mother My Family’s Twisted Relationship to Democracy Two stories by Jovan Nikolić p. 22 Art Installation or Duty-Free Shop?

An interview with Lauren Boyle of DIS curatorial team on the 9th Berlin Biennale p. 24

Inglourious Poets for German Commemorative Theatre Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Max Czollek on Jewish identities in Germany p. 31

We Call It Ludwig Rilke and Russia ME

New Projects p. 35

Dancers instead of Soldiers, or: Gestures against Fear Boris Charmatz on new spaces of experience for dance p. 40 Cultivating a Conscience in Rural Space On Rural Life and Landscapes

by Kenneth Anders p. 43

Bodies and Stages Influenza My Truth / How many truths fit into a human being?

Freeplay 2016 – still Bang on a Can @ Villa Musica Happy Hunting Ground Projeto Brasil Walls – ­Iphigenia ­in Exile Dance and Theatre

New Projects p. 46 Committees & Imprint p. 50

Khaos ­Borderlines Human Trade Network / “It’s all about food.” Really?

Asylum of the Tired European LiteraTurm 2016 Our Common F ­ utures

Sisters in African Cinema

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Alternative narratives by

HAND the Sinti and Roma

reader’s in the arts and sciences

TA L E

19 “The discourse of power engenders monsters.”

(Michel Foucault) The lifeline of Europe’s Roma goes back a thousand years – and for most of that time, the Roma have been victims of projections, created by the “evil eye” of the non-Roma. Today Roma look back and express their views in the sciences, in literature and the fine arts.

Armed with post-colonial theory, they now decide for themselves how they wish to portray themselves, how they wish to appear. Even as a fortune teller, predicting the fate of the financial market from the palm of its hand. In the following, the writer Manuel Gogos speaks with the American theorist Ethel Brooks, the English artist Daniel Baker, the Hungarian art historian Tímea Junghaus, the music ethnographer Petra Gelbart and the Sinto musician and activist Romeo Franz. ­Deconstructing the Gypsy Manuel Gogos: The “gypsy” is a European invention. Let’s take a look at the archaeology of these images and deconstruct them together. These projections of wild men, seductive women and scruffy, but happy children. In effect, the Roma were long assigned attributes comparable to those of the African and Asian “primitives” in colonial and ethnographic discourse. Is the history of the Roma in Europe one of “inner colonisation”?

Romeo Franz: They were a marginalised group, like executioners or knackers. Antiziganism is now over 500 years old and has since become an integral part of ­Europe. The construct of the “gypsy” is merely a facsimile of poor customs, a hologram of uncivilised behaviour. And a warning for members of the majority society to adapt.

Daniel Baker: I think designating the “other” as a repository of fears and desires is ambiguous. Actually I believe this colonisation is something of a projection itself. By various means, the Roma have set themselves apart from the majority society. And in doing so, they provided a kind of projection screen onto which others in turn projected their constructed images.

Tímea Junghaus: From an art-historical perspective, there’s evidence that confirms this. In the panopticum of modernity, we see that artists of Central Europe never felt the need to travel to Haiti. It was because of the character of the Roma, the darker skin, the black hair, the unconventional manner of dressing, these artists simply visited the “colony” which was closest to them – the Roma settlement. That’s where they found their “primitives”.

Petra Gelbart: I really like Daniel’s idea of this projection screen that the Roma represent for the majority population. But from the perspective of musicology, I would say there’s also a certain kind of tension there. Many Roma musicians, if not most of them, identify themselves with exactly these stereotypes. They say: yes, we’re fiery, we’re passionate, that’s what makes us strong! And the same goes for various music styles like Flamenco which really cannot be performed without this emotional component. The same applies to Gypsy Jazz which musically speaking falls into a completely different category. Despite how different they sound, people talk about them the same way.

Ethel Brooks: The parallels to colonialism are really, really strong. And so too are the parallels to orientalism. Like Edward Said writes, orientalism has less to do with the so-called “Orient” than it does with our own world, the “West”. I think this an important point. All of these pro-

jections have more to do with non-Roma, with Gadsche, than with the Romani, with ourselves. The crazy thing is that these projections have become a part of our relationship to one another.

Reading maps, reading palms Manuel Gogos: Ethel, you were in the lecture performance “A Roma Model / The Cosmopolitan Other” with Daniel at the “Former West” festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2013. Part of the performance featured you, Ethel, reading palms, and you, Daniel, laying Tarot cards. This performative reference to the fortune-telling cliché – was this a critical, perhaps even post-ironic form of knowledge production?

Europe in particular is a region where millions and millions of Roma live, and have been living in the same place for over a thousand years. Yet this is erased from the current discourse.

Romeo Franz: Two hundred years ago, my great, great, great grandparents had their own houses. That shows me that there was always a desire to settle and put down roots. That was their ambition. Our identification is very strong. My grandfather fought for Germany in World War I. We are even regionally patriotic – we’re “Prussian Sinti”.

Ethel Brooks: I think part of our work is to reclaim this history of mobility, this “nomadic sensitivity”. But as a complex history, at least as complex as the history of America.

Daniel Baker: At this particular event, what we wanted to do was transfer the imagery of fortune telling to speculating about trends in the financial markets. On the one hand, we used these images to refer to traditional Romani forms of knowledge production, but on the other, to emphasise the mechanisms of discrimination.

Tímea Junghaus: It’s a wonderful opportunity to rewrite this history from our own point of view. Historically speaking, this so-called “nomadic experiment” entails revisiting smaller and larger genocides: fleeing, hiding, moving on, becoming victims again, and so on.

Ethel Brooks: For me the main focus was on the winding paths of knowledge production, regardless of whether it’s stock market speculation, or simply interpreting the past as they do in psychoanalysis. Divination lies at the centre of all of these forms of knowledge. What I found really fascinating and “telling” was the uproar we caused with our project.

On the one hand, we had Roma activists saying “By using all these stereotypes, you’re hurting our cause!” And on the other hand, these awful people who said, “You are magical people, but you’re selling out your magic ...”

In the shelter of trees

Storytelling Manuel Gogos: There’s a cliché that the Roma are the guardians of the secret, but have no historical awareness – they live each day carefree like children. Despite the lack of written documentation for much of their history, couldn’t we argue that the Roma are in fact very conscious of tradition? Isn’t storytelling simply an alternative form of passing down one’s culture? Or is telling stories around a campfire simply another cliché?

Daniel Baker: Maybe storytelling is a cliché, but maybe it isn’t. It is, of course, historically relevant, simply because we the Roma are what I would prefer to call “independent” of the written word. Naturally, you could also call them “illiterate”. But in our type of communication, we’ve occupied ourselves more with generating visual and performative forms of meaning. I would say that the gypsy as the storyteller is a cliché, but one based upon a very old tradition, a ubiquitous practice.

Stereotypes enter communities from the outside. But symbols can also gain meaning within communities.

There’s a very fine line separating the two.

Travelling people?

Manuel Gogos: The Roma arrived in Europe at the dawn of the modern age as nations slowly began taking shape and the connection between one’s country/heritage and one’s identity became ever more entwined. Suddenly these strangers appeared and showed no interest whatsoever in a country of their own, not even in being a “nation”. But they were border-crossers and transnationalists par excellence. What exactly did the locals, the settlers, have against them?

Petra Gelbart: Let me turn the question around: why does the majority of the population find it so annoying that almost all of the Roma have long become settled themselves? I come from Central Europe and originate from a mix of different Roma cultures. Some of them cultivated a nomadic lifestyle, but that was very much the exception. There are ten to twelve million of us Roma in Europe today. We’re the largest minority, and Central

Manuel Gogos: For centuries the Roma sought refuge in the forests. Those who lived in “civilisation”, in towns and cities, regarded the forests as impervious, menacing. The famous Polish Roma poet Bronisława Waj (Papusza) once wrote, “No one understands me, no one but the woods and rivers ...” Was living outdoors really an expression of the Roma’s special affinity for nature? Or was the forest primarily a place of refuge – in other words, does the history of this relationship demand a political reading as well?

Ethel Brooks: At a very basic level, yes, the woods truly served as a hiding place. What’s more, the Roma were not allowed to own land. In the Habsburg Empire, in Spain, France, England, there were restrictions in place everywhere. Where else could they go? And what were they permitted to do to earn their living? My mother grew up with horses, she slept in the stables or in the open field, and up until her death she felt nostalgia for this kind of life. But the reason behind it wasn’t her mystical connection to nature. It was simply how her family earned its living.

Bohemian artists Manuel Gogos: There are these negative associations with the Roma. Yet on the other hand, many people identify themselves with them. The hippies dreamed of the campfire romanticism of these “European Indians”. And the anti-bourgeois attitude of many artists seemed to correspond to the “Bohemian” lifestyle. For example, there are the romanticised portrayals of gypsies in Achim von Arnim’s “Isabella von Ägypten” or Federico García Lorca’s “Poema del cante jondo”. Are these forms of respect and admiration? Or rather “positive discrimination”?

Ethel Brooks: It was a product of the 19th century – the romantic period, to be more precise. And it’s absolutely symbiotically linked to discrimination and racism. I love García Lorca, his gypsy romances are beautiful in so many ways. But it’s still an appropriation of the label “gypsy”. It’s the same thing that recently happened with the song “Drunk in Love” by Beyoncé where she simply integrated a sample of the voice of the Hungarian Roma singer Mitsou.

Gypsy Kings Manuel Gogos: Roma are often extolled as “born ­musicians”.

But that glosses over the fact that musical mastery is the product of hard work. There are countless stories, like the one of the “gifted” guitarist Django Reinhardt who

20 supposedly established European jazz in a caravan park near Paris. Or the success story of the Gypsy Kings.

Where does this special connection to music come from which is also present in the clichés of the beautiful ­Carmen or the Hungarian Csárdás fiddlers?

Romeo Franz: I have to say I know more unmusical Sinti and Roma than musical ones. We aren’t born with an instrument in our hand. We’re simply influenced by our environment. I myself play the violin and piano. My first band was an old-fashioned dance orchestra which played a kind of “dinner music”. Later I founded my first Sinto band, but we didn’t play the Hungarian Csárdás. German Sinti music is more oriented to Django, in the direction of coffee house music or swing.

What’s remarkable is not the fact that Sinti and Roma are good musicians, but rather how much influence Roma composers have had on such famous composers as Liszt or Brahms. It shows that the minority culture provides important impulses for all of society.

Daniel Baker: Music is an iconic Roma art form and is accepted both within and outside the community. But it’s only one aspect of how it contributes to society. The idea that Roma life is inseparable from the creative process is very much alive in the music scene, but in other areas, it’s practically non-existent.

Manuel Gogos: But the Roma are becoming more visible in contemporary art as well. Artists are increasingly using media platforms to stage their alternative concepts.

Is it their goal to present their own image of themselves in public, their own epiphanies?

Tímea Junghaus: Our European Roma Cultural Foundation recently opened a venue for Roma contemporary art in Budapest exactly when the political situation there left no other place open to Hungary’s Roma. As a result, “Gallery 8” became a venue of political intervention which aims to present its self-image through artistic means, not only in the service of its own community, but also as an integral part of the European art scene.

Manuel Gogos: Ethel, you took part in the exhibition project “Have a look into my life!” in Graz. What was the purpose of your project?

Ethel Brooks: In preparation for our exhibition project, we asked all sorts of people: which Romani words are most important to you, which are key terms? It was an attempt to re-appropriate the language. To reclaim our imagery, but also to reclaim our language.

Manuel Gogos: Another important, complex question deals with ethnicity in the arts. When Roma artists and intellectuals, such as Gabi Jiménez and Damian Le Bas, decidedly draw attention to their Roma identity – isn’t there a certain danger of portraying oneself as the “other” in art?

Daniel Baker: I think there are times when defining yourself as a Roma artist can be useful, and at other times, not so useful. I’ve often discussed this with other artists.

Naturally each of us tries to generate as much attention as possible. And if self-labelling helps, that’s fine, at least for me. Labelling can be helpful. But in the end, that’s all it is – just a label.

“Gypsy Baroque” Manuel Gogos: Matéo Maximoff was one of the first Roma fiction writers – he has been described as the “cultural memory of the Roma”. In his novel The Ursitory, he ­portrays a society which functions according to its own laws and values. Outsiders have regarded life in that society as highly mysterious. Daniel, you yourself are an artist who has played with symbols associated with the Roma like “roses”, “roosters” or “caravans”. Is it up to the viewer to decipher these hidden symbols? Or do they simply serve as superfluous decoration which conceals your political statement?

Daniel Baker: In the past ten to fifteen years, my works have made reference to something I call “Roma aesthetics”. It all goes back to my own beginnings as an artist, to when I was a kid, surrounded by certain objects in my family’s living room, all of which seemed to have an eloquence of their own and conveyed information about the cultural and social values of my community. It has been influential for my work, and still is today. I wish to introduce various audiences to Roma aesthetics in order to probe how much they can influence culture on a broader scale. You could say that my modus operandi is “infiltration”.

The camp Manuel Gogos: One of the key motifs in artistic production and discourse at the moment is extra-territoriality, re-mapping, but also living in a camp. Historically, this was the “gypsy camp”, but also the slave quarter and later the concentration camp. Isn’t it true that this is something all too many Roma continue to experience even today? Being deported? Forced to live in a camp as “displaced persons”?

Petra Gelbart: No matter where and how the Roma actually live, everyone always assumes it has to be in a camp!

There are millions of them everywhere, in cities and apartments, just not in a camp!

Daniel Baker: Nonetheless, there is a certain yearning for this form of coexistence. That’s the other side of camp life. This aspiration, communal life as vibrant and dynamic. And in this we see the continuation of discrimination. If someone in England wants to put a caravan on their land to lease out to holidaymakers, they receive permission. But if gypsies want to do the same, they are not permitted to.

Ethel Brooks: Right now I’m working on a book about the camp. It’s about reclaiming the camp as such, and I use the word “camp” deliberately. It’s about reclaiming a piece of Roma history. For what it’s worth, the “gypsy camp” stands in contrast to the monumentality of the nation.

Porajmos (genocide) Manuel Gogos: For centuries Sinti and Roma have suffered from persecution, marginalisation and discredit, and biological eradication. Out of some 500,000 Sinti and Roma who lived in countries occupied by the National Socialists, no more than 10 percent survived. This was undoubtedly a case of genocide. Yet far into the postwar era, many people continued to deny that it was the result of racial persecution. So this isn’t simply a matter of Nazi persecution, but also a case of twisting historical facts and obscuring Nazi crimes after 1945?

Romeo Franz: The racist mindset, in which pseudo-scientists like Eva Justin or Dr Robert Ritter laid the groundwork for racially motivated extermination by the Nazis, continued without interruption after 1945. For now the victims sat opposite their perpetrators. Eva Justin conducted field research on the Sinti and Roma for the city of Frankfurt until 1962.

Manuel Gogos: You contributed to the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism with a composition/sound installation titled “Mare Manuschenge” / “Our People” – a piece which directly refers to the fate of your mother and grandmother.

Romeo Franz: Romani Rose, the chairman of the Central Council of the Sinti and Roma, called me in 2012 and said he was looking for a violinist who could play just one single note at the ceremony. I tried, but at some point I couldn’t stand this note any longer. Instead I imitated a whistle that Sinti often use to call their children. It’s a sound that each of us recognise, it’s a bit like a mark of identification, a signal. Then I transposed it

onto the gypsy minor scale. Shortly before the memorial was completed, I met with Dani Caravan, the Israeli architect who designed the memorial, at the construction site, and he said, “That’s it!” For me, it was possibly the most significant thing I’ve ever achieved in my life.

The artist, curator and scholar Daniel Baker was born in Kent, Great Britain. He received his PhD from the London Royal College of Art with a dissertation on “Roma Aesthetics”. In 2007 and 2011, he contributed to the Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale as an artist and consultant.

Ethel Brooks teaches at the department of Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University in the USA. In 2007 she wrote a book titled “Unraveling the Garment Industry” which explores female labour in the globalised economy. On 11 January 2016, Barack Obama appointed Ethel Brooks as a member of the U.S. Memorial Council. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of RomArchive.

The violinist and pianist Romeo Franz is dedicated to cultivating the musical tradition of the German Sinti. He composed the sound installation “Mare Manuschenge” for the Memorial to the Roma and Sinti Victims of National Socialism.

Romeo Franz is a member of various committees and organisations, devoted to advancing the interests of the Sinti and Roma in Germany.

The musician, scholar and activist Petra Gelbart combines Roma song traditions with elements of other genres. She received her PhD from Harvard University with a music-ethnological study and is currently developing a centre for Roma music and culture at New York University. Petra Gelbart is the curator for music at RomArchive. She lives in the United States and Czechia.

The art historian and curator Tímea Junghaus is the editor of the extensive publication on Romani contemporary art “Meet Your Neighbours” (2006). In 2007 she curated the first Roma Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Junghaus is the founding director of the European Roma Cultural Foundation headquartered in Budapest and serves as curator for the fine arts at RomArchive.

Manuel Gogos is a freelance writer and exhibition maker.

He works as a literary critic (Tagesspiegel, NZZ), feature contributor (WDR, Deutschlandradio) and documentary filmmaker (3sat, Arte). Gogos specialises in the museologisation of migration movements, an interest which arose from his family background as the son of a Greek guest worker in Germany.

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RomArchive Digital Archive of the Roma | ­ igitales Archiv der Sinti und D Roma | Romano Digitalno ­Archivo

The Federal Cultural Foundation has allocated 3.8 million euros in funding over the next five years to create an international digital archive for Sinti and Roma art. RomArchive contrasts stereotypes with facts and a self-written history by the Sinti and Roma. An international team of curators is responsible for its content, while an advisory council of international experts oversees strategic matters. In 2018 Rom­Archive will officially go online with an exemplary selection of the most important positions in all areas of artistic production, as well as ­scholarly essays on the civil rights ­movement and self-produced docu­ mentation of Nazi persecution. The development phase (2015–2018) will be accompanied by a number of related events and a blog. The European Roma Cultural Foundation and the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma have supported the project in an advisory function from the start.

RomArchive is also receiving fi ­ nancial support from the Goethe-­Institut and the German Federal Agency for ­Civil Education. The Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek is a cooperation partner, entrusted with the project’s technical implementation. Multilingual content is being developed so as to ensure that RomArchive is accessible to international audiences. In addition to German and English, the archive will be available in Romani. In 2019 the initiators of the project, Isabel Raabe and Franziska Sauerbrey, will hand over management of RomArchive to a European Roma non-profit organisation.

For more information, visit: ↗ www www.kulturstiftung-bund.de/ romarchive, facebook.com/Romano­ Archive und twitter.com/RomArchive

The Federal Cultural Foundation also funds the following projects highlighting the culture and history of the Sinti and Roma:

The National Socialist Genocide of the Sinti and Roma History – Dimension – Memory

It took a long time for Germany to officially recognise the genocide of the Sinti and Roma – the memorial commemorating the Sinti and Roma murdered by the Nazi regime just recently opened in 2012. Today, they represent the one ethnic minority in Germany which attracts the most group-related hostility. A touring exhibition by the Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg will examine the group’s history in order to sharpen our view of events today and encourage dialogue between the minority and majority society. The Centre

draws attention to examples of stereotyping, racism and anti-Ziganism in language and images. The exhibition will primarily focus on the genocide during the years of National Socialism. Documents of the Nazi regime will be presented alongside items, reports and private photos of the Sinti and Roma.

Moreover, the exhibition will address the ideological prejudices which originated in National Socialism and continue today, the late acknowledgement of the genocide and how this became integral in shaping their identity. The civil rights movement of the Sinti and Roma and present-day anti-Ziganism will also be addressed.

The entire exhibition will be produced in both German and English, and supplemented by multimedia presentations. The texts will be accessible via smartphone. An online version of the exhibition is also planned.

Artistic director: Reinhold Lagrene Project manager: Frank Reuter Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds Nuremberg: Apr. 2017; NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne: 7 Jul. 2017 (opening) ↗ www.sintiundroma.de

Rajasthan Music performance by Marc Sinan Company & the Dresden ­Symphony Orchestra

The guitarist Marc Sinan has developed and composed several multimedia productions about current political issues in recent years. In his prize-­winning production “Dede Korkut”, for which he embarked on a music-ethnological expedition to Central Asia, he examines one of the most influential works of Turkish literary history, drawing references to the current issues of hate and exclusion. For his latest project, he plans to conduct musical research in the state of Rajasthan in north-western India. The region is believed to be the place of origin of the Sinti and Roma. Marc Sinan will be accompanied by several artists, e.g. the fine artists Delaine & Damien Le Bas, who will be responsible for designing the set, and the Czech singer, actress and violinist Iva Bittová. For the artists, the journey is both an opportunity to become acquainted with one’s cultural roots and to engage in musical encounter and exchange.

Based on his musical research, Marc Sinan will develop a multimedia musical performance on the culture of the Sinti and Roma. The production will combine music, dance, theatre, fine arts and video art with traditional Indian folk music and contemporary musical influences. The performance will be conducted by the Marc Sinan Company in cooperation with the Dresden Symphony Orchestra and ­other artists. The Dresden Symphony ­Orchestra has successfully collaborated with Sinan in the past and is among the world’s leading symphony orchestras of contemporary music.

Artistic director, composer and ­guitarist: Marc Sinan Violin, vocals and performance: Iva Bittová (CZ) Stage design and video installation: Damian & ­Delaine Le Bas (GB) Music: Marc Sinan Company Berlin and guests from India ­Orchestras: Dresden Symphony Orchestra, No Borders Orchestra (RS) ­Conductor: Premil Petrović (RS) Producer: ­Markus Rindt HELLERAU, Dresden: Spring 2017, additional performances in Berlin, Pécs, Bucharest and Belgrade ↗ www.marcsinan.com

Mindj Panther Roma Army

The history of the Roma is one of persecution, exclusion and discrimination. The recognition of the genocide carried out by the National Socialists came late. Even today, the Roma are still victims of hate crimes in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Germany and elsewhere. Anti-Ziganist images are circulated in the media and the debate on supposed poverty-driven immigration continues to stir up resentment. The Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin wishes to do its part to counter these racist projections of the majority society and make the Roma in artistic works more visible. “Mindj Panther – Roma Army” is a manifesto, a stage play, a vehicle of self-empowerment and an attack. In Romani, “Mindj“ means “Pussy”, the title thus making reference to both Pussy Riot and the Black Panthers. The idea for the play was conceived by the sisters Simonida and Sandra Selimović. The two Romanies from Serbia live in Austria and base their actions on the Vienna Group, their works are situational and actionistic. They have teamed up with the Israeli director Yael Ronen and several Roma actors to develop the play. Following research visits to historic sites and court rooms, where decisions regarding the deportation of Roma families are delivered, the artists will gradually develop the “Roma Army” in a collective rehearsal process.

Artistic director: Yael Ronen (IL) Artists: Simonida Selimović (CS), Sandra Selimović (CS) and others Dramaturgy: Irina Szodruch Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin: 1 Jan. 2016–8 Apr. 2017 ↗ www.gorki.de

22 Two stories by Jovan Nikolić

The SWING In memory of my mother I attached two strings up high and now hold tight to them. Strings which my joyful anxiety and my friend, the wind, are playing with. I swing freely through the air, rising away from the earth, defying gravity. I lean forward, air whistles at my back like the tail of a comet, and then I dive head first from one point of the arc and fly to the other, which is beckoning me to return to where my back is facing. And this is true magic, for flying backwards is something even birds can’t do.

I fly like Alice in Wonderland and connect the points – the one in front of me and the other, his twin, behind an invisible mirror in the air, through which I constantly pass, flying back and forth. Each time I rise upward or plunge down and back, I feel an indescribable pleasure that I hardly know somewhere in the area of my belly button. A pleasure my body remembers from the cradle when I, just a new-born, was gently rocked to sleep in my mother’s hands.

Now when I swing back and forth, I have no need to sleep because I feel that I’m already dreaming. Or rather, while I’m swinging, I constantly lose myself in dreaming, yet I am awake, flying through these dreams with eyes wide open.

Anyone who daydreams and wishes to return to the wellsprings of his joy, like the Danube flowing back to the Brigach and the Breg and perhaps the Musel in Bad Dürrheim (or rather, its tributary), may he join me on the strings of my swing and flow into the tributaries of his early memory, regardless of age.

Sometimes when I hurtle skyward, a pleasant fear wells up that I might overshoot the pinnacles of movement, untether myself from the weight of my body and fly away into the unknown. This fear of flying is not one of panic, it simply awakens the desire for a time long forgotten when everyone could really fly – if only he could remember that he had been able to at one point.

I swing, back and forth, and again and again, with each swing I breathe in deeply, and the air seems to breathe me into it as well. And again I shudder sweetly at the thought that this cyclic movement could forever conquer me, that I could be a small planet forever after a whole, a full circle, imprisoned in circular loneliness.

But there is a way to stop the shuddering and the fear in my stomach caused by swinging. With simple, controlled motions, gently braking, I can calm everything down and bring it to a halt. With one step, I can leave the swing and return to solid ground at any time.

Shortly afterwards, still floating on pleasure in which indescribable joy and slight anxiety mix, I will shakily walk away, that feeling of swinging still in my legs and not realising that my swing was also the pendulum of a clock.

That with every pass, I was measuring out the time I was given to live.

My FAMILY’S Twisted Relationship to DEMOCRACY For quite some time now, I’ve been telling my relatives that when I come to Belgrade on holiday, I no longer wish to be dragged into family debates every time, especially if the subject happens to be politics.

After such discussions, we normally don’t talk to one another for at least a whole week. And then shortly before departing, we hastily patch things up. Last time it all started when my father unexpectedly declared at lunch: “I don’t believe in a European Union. Do you really think the United States would stand for another economic power alongside China, Russia and India?”

“Don’t be so harsh,” my mother replied, “it’s helping to advance democracy and solidarity in the world.”

“What democracy, for Chrissake!” my father blurted, “To have a European democracy, you need a European people, but there’s no such thing, just nation states.”

“OK”, I said, unable to stay quiet any longer, “but still it’s advancing the principle of social justice, that’s one of the European ideas if I’m not mistaken. What’s more, the model of the European Union represents a guarantee that the countries of Europe never wage war on each other again.”

“They would never do such a thing, one crow doesn’t peck out the eye of another,” my father blustered at me, “Now they only wage war against others. Wasn’t Serbia with its seven million inhabitants bombed because of a single dictator? And Serbia’s been a part of Europe for a long time. And what moral principles are you talking about? All the European governments are controlled by the banks and multinational corporations, alright? Don’t talk to me about social justice now, since the elite are raking in the profits and the people are getting poorer and poorer.

It can’t go on this way.”

Then my grandfather spoke up: “In the USA 400 people own as much wealth as half of the population.

I read it in the newspaper, but I can’t recall which one and when it was.”

“Nonetheless, I still like the idea that there are no more visas, that the borders are disappearing and a common currency is being introduced,” my mother added.

“The European Union, as we knew it one or two years ago, doesn’t exist anymore,” my sister said, jumping into the discussion, “It’s changed before our very eyes so quickly that we weren’t able to notice any major change.”

“Very interesting,” I replied, “and how did you manage noticing it despite the speed?”

“Well, after Europe’s financial crisis, which I certainly didn’t cause, I noticed it first in my wallet and my household budget!”

“Naturally,” my father continued, “the banking oligarchs induced the crisis together with the political elite. Today’s politicians have so many privileges as if they yearned for that old feudal glory. And nobody can touch them.”

“Well, they’ve got the police and army that protects them from the hungry and discontented masses,” said grandfather.

“You can look at it any way you want to, but I live in Germany, in a country where the voters can change their government, where even the president can be removed from office if he violates democratic principles and laws. And more importantly, the freedom of the press is impressive, there are no untouchables,

and the welfare and health systems also deserve respect. And I beg you, please, don’t ruin every holiday I spend in Serbia!”

“Well, then, go back to your Germany and take your pro-European triumphalism with you,” my father pounded his hand on the table, “and don’t forget, you’re just one more migrant there, and you’ll always be one!”

“My son,” grandfather tried calming things down, “don’t you understand that America dominates Europe? Recently I read in the papers that America won’t allow Snowden to get the Nobel Prize. What kind of Royal Swedish Academy is it if America has such influence over it?”

“You said it,” my father laughed, “and don’t you see how much America influences countries in Europe? Like how – on American orders – they denied the plane carrying Bolivia’s president Morales to fly over several countries on its way to Moscow, forcing it to land in Vienna! Hey, they searched the airplane carrying the president of a sovereign country for thirteen hours! And you want to tell me something about the so-called free and democratic European Union?!”

“They behaved as if they were American vassals,” grandfather concluded.

“Alright, you guys,” I said, turning to father and grandfather and determined to leave what seemed to me a completely biased and pointless discussion, “why all this hate towards America when we’re supposedly talking about Europe?”

Grandfather stood up: “Because America is a sinful country! The Americans are ridden with guilt, they’ve committed genocide against people of colour!

America is ridden with colour guilt! They herded the redskins into reserves, they used the blacks as slaves and on the yellows they dropped two atomic bombs – you see, that’s why!”

“And let’s not forget,” my father added mildly, “those are the three colours on the flag of your Germany ...”

“I think you’re being more than malicious, we shouldn’t polemicise any longer,” I replied, left the dining room table and headed off to my room.

“And by the way”, I added when I swept past my father, “the yellow on the German flag isn’t yellow, it’s gold.”

Jovan Nikolić (*1955) is one of the leading voices of Roma contemporary literature today. Born in Belgrade as the son of a Serbian mother and Romni father, he has lived in Germany ever since fleeing from Serbia in 1999. In addition to producing several volumes of poetry and prose, he has published plays and satirical pieces as a columnist, political satirist and song writer. In 2000 his drama “Kosovo mon amour” premiered at the Ruhrfestspiele. A number of his works have been translated into German, including Zimmer mit Rad. Gedichte und Prosa (The Room with a Wheel, Drava, 2004), Weißer Rabe schwarzes Lamm (White Crow, Black Sheep, Drava, 2006 & 2011) and Seelenfänger, lautlos lärmend (Soul Catcher, Noisily Silent, Drava, 2011). Jovan Nikolić is a member of the Serbian PEN Centre, has served as the vice president of the International Romani Writers’ Association (IRWA) since 2002 and is an honorary member of the International Romani Academy of Arts and Sciences in Belgrade.

He has received numerous scholarships, awards and distinctions from, e.g., the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the German PEN Centre, KulturKontakt Austria and the Cultural City Network Graz.

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24

A R T Installation o r D U T Y F R E E S h o p ?

An interview with Lauren Boyle of DIS curatorial team on the 9th Berlin Biennale

25 Gregor Quack: I would like to start by asking what exactly DIS is. I know that you are a group made up of four individuals: Lauren Boyle, David Toro, Solomon Chase and Marco Roso. But beyond that it seems like the more I read about you, the more different definitions I find.

Lauren Boyle: It's true. We've been called everything from a design collective to a fashion magazine. We’re an art collective, we’re editors, we’re stylists, we’re entrepreneurs, and now we’re curators. We really embrace this multivalence. Whenever anybody has a new name for it, we say ‘Bring it on!’

Yet there are also interesting distinctions you make between yourselves and other groups. You once explained in an interview that you operate more as an entity than as a collective. What did you mean by that?

When we call ourselves an entity that does signal a certain affinity with business. We have established ourselves as an LLC rather than, say, a non-profit. Of course, the funny thing is that it doesn’t even work that well on a financial level. Originally, we just did it because it was the easiest way to get a bank account with multiple signatures of people that are not married to each other. It all started in 2008, when David and Solomon sent out an e-mail blast to a group of friends about wanting to start an online magazine. Soon the conversation was distilled into a core group of first seven and then four people. We started the magazine website, and soon expanded into our image agency DISimages and a store for artist-designed products called DISown.

The fact that to conduct yourself as a business seemed like the logical thing to do also says something about the state of the New York art scene, no?

Exactly. DIS was born in the wake of the financial crisis, which was a really interesting moment to be in New York. We had all been very busy doing all kinds of things in the so-called creative industries, including work for mega corporations like Apple. Because it was freelance, those jobs dried up pretty quickly after the crash. For the first time in years, we found ourselves with a bunch of free time on our hands. We are sensitive to the fact that the crisis was horrible for many people, but for us it was very cathartic and productive.

Although the crisis soon developed into a global problem, it must have felt that much more seismic in New York, the home of Wall Street.

Absolutely, it was much more than just an economic turbulence. For us, it felt like a clean break with the decade that had come before. This was the same year that Obama became president. It was a cultural, aesthetic, a mental shift. Everything was put into question. And we saw this as our opportunity to create a platform for all the amazing creative people we knew that didn't have any public visibility at the time.

Does your affinity to business also change how you interact with friends and colleagues around you? As an LLC, can there be a meaningful difference between collective thinking, friendship and networking?

Of course networking has added connotations, but we welcome those. When we started the magazine we were expanding our network. The advantage to thinking in terms of a network is that the word itself already suggests a potential for change and growth. You always want to bring a certain amount of new people in for every project, but you also don't want to lose where you came from. So many people have helped us over the course of the past few years so, of course, our Berlin Biennale is going to be full of these people, some old and some new.

Seeing as you’re now curating a large biennial, it seems remarkable that the institutional art world played almost no role in the early work of DIS. Does this also have something to do with your backgrounds as New Yorkers?

That is a big part of it. In New York, it's survival.

There is almost no public funding for art, the rents are high, there are more crossovers between industries.

There is less stigma attached to having a job alongside your art practice. It’s not such a big deal to have an art practice and also work at a tech company. For us it was actually very formative to have these different experiences instead of living in an art-world bubble. Marco is the only one of us who has ever explored being a solo artist, but he was also a creative director in beauty advertising, his clients were Garnier, Wella, and L'Oréal. If we had wanted to be painters, we may have moved to Berlin or Philadelphia, but we all knew we wanted to live in the chaos of New York.

If the identity of both DIS and many of its core members is so strongly connected to a city like New York, how does it feel to transition to Berlin?

The move to Berlin allows us to cultivate the feeling of foreignness. We are from another country and another system, and in a sense the institution of KW and the Berlin Biennale feel like foreign countries to us. We don't always speak the same language, but we think this brings about some very productive miscommunications.

We cannot fall into the trap of trying to be everything to everybody – to be relevant or contemporary, or communicative, or representative, or critical. If we were to fill the Berlin Biennale with big-name artists, half of our audience would be happy, but the other would say “DIS tried to appease the art world and went mainstream.” If we decided we were only going to work with young creative workers from outside the art world, that would be just what people expected. Our solution is to just do both!

We enjoy the irreverence of putting seminal artists like Adrian Piper on the same level playing field as the fashion designer Telfar. Perhaps that’s not quite what Berliners think of when they say “critical art.”

And yet, your magazine does have moments that could be described as critical. My favorite example is an early photo shoot you did called Shoulder Dysmorphia, where you photographed a fictitious beauty trend to surgically alter shoulder bones. In that moment, you drew attention to existing, industry-fueled trends – body modification, unattainable beauty ideals – and took them to their logical and absurd conclusions.

The difference is that for us, there is rarely a sense of “us against them.” We always try to recognise our own conflicts of interest. We think of it as a radical receptivity to the present. We’re attracted to a certain commercial language – a particular way of smiling or the type of soft box lighting that makes everything look even, and normal, and perfect. But instead of unmasking it as pernicious, we play with it. If you ask me about what we want our biennial to be about, one way to put it would be that we want to represent the present in drag.

You emphasise your interest in the immediate present, whereas some past biennials have felt almost obsessed with the city of Berlin as a site of history. Does this also play to your experience of the city?

Of course, history is everywhere. But for us, it is most important to address Berlin as we see it today. Like I said, we're tourists here. One of the first things we were expected to do as curators was to come up with potential venues and to find “untapped spaces." And we resisted that to a degree. If our biennial were to occupy an “abandoned” building it’s not unlikely that we would be acting as a primer for private acquisition.

So you chose Pariser Platz, the square in front of the Brandenburg Gate, as one of the most important sites of the biennial – pretty much the opposite of an untapped space.

Pariser Platz was one of the first places we were attracted to. It’s an iconic tourist trap, but we remembered that this was where Michael Jackson once dangled his baby from his Adlon Hotel window. Long before throngs of selfie sticks began to frame every historical monument, this was a space in which to attempt the precarious and risky balance between private and public space. The square is also surrounded by largely invisible networks of corporate and political centers of powers. You can find the U.S. and French embassies, but also Lockheed Mar-

26 tin, Allianz Stiftungsforum, DZ Bank, and BP Europa.

For the 9th Berlin Biennale we’re using the Akademie der Künste building. It's a historical site that has been sheathed in a large glass building and a perfect visual metaphor for present-day Germany’s self-image: a national legacy with a sheen of transparency. As is typical in Berlin, the building’s main exhibition spaces will be closed for renovation during this summer, but we are happy because this gives us the opportunity to occupy transitory spaces, event spaces and passageways, which normally would be harder to access for the public.

So the spaces you’re working in are KW, various buildings on Pariser Platz … … and then we also have the old Staatsratsgebäude, a gigantic GDR building that incorporates parts of the old Stadtschloss in its façade. Today it houses the ESMT European School of Management and Technology. We were attracted to the way the building’s communist past clashes with the contemporary codes of global business.

When you see Walter Womacka’s socialist realist stained glass windows staring down at you as you pass live feeds of the stock market, it really says it all. We will occupy some parts of the building that remain unrenovated.

Would you say that you were mainly looking for venues that make certain tensions and paradoxes visible?

You could say that. Many of the spaces we'll be exhibiting in feel like corporate or commercial spaces, transitional spaces or duty free shops. Individual works are really not about tourism, or gentrification, or the Berlin Biennale as a format, but perhaps the ideas of transition and tourism are the backdrop against which we’re working on this biennial. Korakrit Arunanondchai is working with Alex Gvojic to create an installation on a tour boat along the Spree. It is conceived as a Thai wedding boat and debuts a new video work. Throughout the Berlin Biennale’s duration, it will follow the standard route favored by regular tour boats on the Spree, passing Museum Island and the city’s government district. The Berlin Biennale visitor becomes a tourist again, a prototypical collector and purveyor of contemporary experience.

You seem to have given extraordinary thought to the selection of your exhibition spaces, even though your original field of editorial work does not always involve spatial thinking. Are there elements from your work as magazine editors and creative workers that inform how you think as curators?

I think it makes us give individual artists more freedom. For us, much of the curatorial pose seems suspect.

We're producers ourselves and so we like to concentrate on building platforms rather than telling artists how to make their work. The different exhibition sites are platforms, but we are also working on others. One example is the communication strategy we are working on with Babak Radboy, who is a creative director in New York and a close friend of ours. His project is called Not In The Berlin Biennale and, quite simply, includes a big group of artists who are not in the Biennale.

It’s interesting that you seem especially invested in parts of the Biennial project that other curators would consider peripheral or even distracting.

That’s the idea. We like to think of Not In the Berlin ­Biennale as not about the Berlin Biennale, but simply in front of it. Like a skin, it protects the vital organs of the true Biennale but at the same time is also the largest organ of all.

Are you thinking about those central functions of the Biennale mostly as a collection of individuals or are there some basic guiding ideas?

There are a few key terms we keep coming back to.

We are fascinated by the rise of hyper-individualism in the face of the utter powerlessness of the individual. On the one hand, what thinking about the Anthropocene, big data and object-orientated philosophy all have in common is that they happen at the expense of the subject.

On the other hand, former symbols of universalism are shattered into ever-more-bespoke services, individualised products. Think of customisable sneakers, individuated

wellness regimes or politicians’ attempts to analyse ever more narrowly specific electoral subgroups.

And the specific thing about your approach is that you don’t seem to take sides. You embrace the paradox.

Exactly. Where others might hold a symposium on data security, we want to go one step further. We don’t just want to think about privacy, we want to engage and even jeopardise it. This is how we approach most ideas.

I’m surprised by this focus on action over analysis.

Artur Żmijewski’s 7th Berlin Biennale also put a premium on art as effective political action.

The funny thing is that I think we're closer to the 7th Berlin Biennale than we are to the eighth.

How so?

I mean, the two will look nothing alike, but I think we do share an affinity for transgressive behaviour. Even though we’re not setting out to achieve this, I also think that our Berlin Biennale will make some people uncomfortable. The way that we're using the building of the Akademie der Künste, for example, goes completely against the grain of what that institution is supposed to stand for. We’re from another generation and political art today doesn't look like it once used to, but we do share with the 7th Berlin Biennale that a lot of the artists in our Berlin Biennale are actually coming up with new models.

And they’re trying to solve problems. You could call that “solutionism,” but there will also be plenty of moments of insecurity and confusion. It won’t always be clear how serious an artist like Christopher Kulendran Thomas is in trying to alert visitors to new investment opportunities.

There will be moments where you don’t know if you're in a VIP lounge of a real estate investment firm or an art installation.

The particular pleasure you have taken in blurring boundaries of art, design and business has always been one of the most compelling things about DIS. But do you think there might also be some value in maintaining such traditional categories, to protect art from becoming subsumed by the fashion world, for instance?

I don’t think we have to worry about the field of art disappearing any time soon. But it is true that much of our work creates a tension that is as exciting as it is perhaps unresolvable. The same blurring of categories that feels transgressive in the confines of the art world can at the same time fit in very well with the kind of streamlining that goes on in the creative sector in general.

All the parts of your biennial share a desire to engage with the present moment, but you leave open if there’s a certain political push underlying that engagement.

For us, we hope people come, we hope they think, reflect, hangout, talk, have a green juice. By now you know that we're not interested in binaries like critical or affirmative, good and bad and we don't have answers to the complex world we live in. It is too easy to think we can “solve” these contradictions by veering to one side – professionalism or amateurism, art or non-art – or by hedging on both sides. It’s tougher to embody these open ends. We are looking to put a face on the tangle of ideologies and aesthetics that make up individual experience in 2016.

Gregor Quack is a freelance art critic and PhD ­student at Stanford University in Palo Alto.

9th Berlin Biennale The 9th Berlin Biennale will take place from 4 June to 18 September 2016 under the artistic direction of the DIS team: Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro. The responsible curators select different venues for each festival. This year the DIS team has chosen the Akademie der Künste on Pariser Platz, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art and the ESMT European School of Management and Technology located in the former East German national council building. Additional venues include the DZ Bank on Pariser Platz and a tour boat which will travel up and down the Spree River through Berlin-Mitte. The Federal Cultural Foundation has been supporting the Berlin Biennale since 2004 as one of Germany’s cultural institutions of excellence with 2.5 million euros per festival.

In its desire to continually reinvent itself, the Berlin Biennale not only highlights the diversity and internationality of the Berlin art scene, but also scrutinises and transcends the conventional methods of international art exhibitions.

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The WORK of BIRDS Of sliced hearts and razor-sharp words ­

by Marica Bodrožić

How do we understand each other and make ­ourselves understood beyond language and ­cultural barriers? We ­asked three authors who are invited to the ­“globale°” literature ­festival.

How does a child conquer the world? Bird by bird.

Word by word. Smile by smile. When we are very young, words look like the faraway sky, banished from our inner selves and sent forth into never-ending space. With every new acoustic space, they rush back to us, become part of our inner ears. We aren’t afraid of the consequences because we aren’t aware of any yet. We are beyond grammar, but are always simultaneously immersed in it. The world is merciful, it prescribes neither understanding nor boundaries. The unknown, the strange, the foreign is a category assigned to us from the very beginning, for the very first person we come in contact with is already strange to us. In that country that we call childhood, there is no passport and no nation, we are humans, outcasts who need others in order to secure a place in our humanness – yet we move in as strangers and we move out again as strangers. When do we actually stop this innocent moving about? Bird by bird, we conquer the great outdoors of sounds without interpreting them, and at some point we know where the speakers’ sentences end, what the pauses say, how they join in the conversation, and when the words talk and when the spaces between them do. We send our sounds to the love of others, we watch and listen inwardly whether they blossom (or wither) in the bliss (or resentment) of a human voice. Life loves us when we are children. And we love it back unconditionally. But the time of dangers is inevitable. The clocks tick the time away. Mysteries and miracles are frowned upon.

And the essence of our life is the most illogical thing of all: love possesses no logic. Now everyone willingly strives to be normal. People suspect something when you smile for no reason. Sometimes they think you’re crazy or dim-witted or you want something from them. But something new always appears, it’s strangely persistent.

When foreign entities meet, the mystery of smiling, for example, multiplies. Why do people smile? (And if they don’t, why not?) What do they want? What should I do if life becomes a question again, in which I must live my life without any ready-made answers? Foreigners come into the country and are not only bringing hardship with them, but questions as well. Who am I if the other is everything he can carry in one hand?

There is an old lady that lives in my street in Berlin.

She could be a hundred, but she’s not telling me. I always have to guess everything when it comes to her.

She smiles at me from her window, in the winter she sits behind the glass and looks out at the street. In the summer she sits on her balcony. I get worried when she’s not there. Does she have relatives? Her husband recently passed away. She told me that. But in what language, I had no idea at first. And yet I love her. I don’t know what her name is, because when she speaks it’s a language I don’t understand. After months of smiling friendship, I realise now it’s Turkish that she’s offering me. It’s amazing to me that she, hobbling on her cane, walks through the streets of our shared city, a global city, as our village of Berlin is now referred to by general agreement, how she moves from place to place, unwaveringly and with impressive purpose and a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, and stops whenever she meets someone who knows her. There is a kind of pub here

patroned only by Turkish men from the Kiez. They call it a club. You can’t simply pop inside for a look. I’m not even going to try. For years that place has been a mystery to me. The aura around it activates the old century in me, the village I come from where the men have the last word, around the billiard table at the inn and on the street and in church. My body didn’t take well to that. It was the supremacy of men that caused me to knot up inside. But one day my father took me with him.

The billiard table was now a green, pleasant paradise.

The men with hats and without, turning in my direction, smiling, that surprised me. Just opposite the ­Turkish club is the street where Marlene Dietrich was born. I love that woman, this one particular person who stood up to the barking of the barbarians. The bloody 20th century didn’t break her. Why not? She had her own set of morals. I think of Marlene whenever my hundred-­ year-old stands in front of me. Her form closely resembles that of the women of my village. Now I notice that she does something that the Dalmatian women never did. She simply enters the club, swinging her cane. Very ostentatiously. A kind of greeting to the men who smoke and gesticulate, and yes, my eyes don’t deceive me, who freeze in awe before the old granny. They practically bow to her. What a figure, completely dressed in black, headscarf, gigantic shoes, a deeply lined and wrinkled face. The patriarchy has no power over her. With a wave of her cane, she makes tea magically appear in her hand, wood is loyal, it ­helps. Tea. Steaming. Men have made it for a woman who is a walking demand. She submits to none of them, by nature she is just one thing: the boss. The next day I spontaneously give my hundred-­ year-old two pieces of cake. I see her sitting behind the window and wave her down. She comes, sees the cake, kisses me and says, ‘Thank you, my sister’. I can’t help but laugh. Over­come with happiness. She speaks German now. The thing with the ‘sister’ is important to her.

Sometimes you lose people, and sometimes you receive them. Thank you, my sister, I now think to myself as well. We might speak a different language, but I know you miss your husband and that you’re lonely and that you’ll be sitting alone on your balcony without him in the summer. You will miss him sorely, and strangely enough, I will too. After all, he always sat there for much of the day. And I also know what I felt when I saw him there for the first time. It was shocking. He reminded me of my father shortly before his death, shortly before a serious illness sent him to his grave at the age of 65, to a place where all bodies are brothers and sisters of the earth. The roots of trees do not discriminate. Trees have no passports, only names. It’s always been that way. And I envy them.

I sit in my kitchen and gaze at the treetops in the courtyard. The radio is on. My old world transmitter.

World. Is it possibly easier to understand with your ears than with those so easily deceived eyes? In a cultural broadcast that I like to listen to, that I trust, I could have sworn that suddenly and to my great surprise they used the word neutralise in connection with the many refugees. I immediately see Dr. Mengele in front of me.

Him and his lethal injections. They stop the heart dead.

Efficiently. This is how you capture the whole person

28 without even having to use an evil needle. When you take someone’s heart away, they’re immediately neutralised, there’s no need to spill blood.

Is that what we want? 2016. Here. The world that I also love is now heating up. The 20th century flares up in it all, especially in the words. The barbarians have left something of theirs behind. They cannot be allowed to triumph. Once again there are many who want to see the fires burn. We have to protect our speechless sisters and brothers and trees. (We may suffer the same fate, for when fire breaks out, it threatens everyone.) We can only achieve this by not neutralising ourselves. Preserving our empathy. A human being who feels and honours life when he or she encounters it in the form of another human being.

The father of a girlfriend of mine in Berlin lives in Tel Aviv. Whenever someone blows himself up in Israel and takes the lives of those around him, his Palestinian friend comes over and they talk about it. They can’t do anything to stop the death and violence. But they don’t want to forget each other. Being together means: we are friends. And we’ll stay friends. We look at each other. We are still human beings. Birds might fly past when both men are sharing tea together.

Birds also carry out their work in the same way, regardless of what happens in the human world.

A bird’s work is quiet, as quiet as human life is short. Both friends are aware of their mortality.

Perhaps each of us should have such a friend, if only for the sake of meeting exactly at those moments when weapons take over the conversation.

Of course, we could always stay locked up inside ourselves. But no one can be a someone without the love (the eyes, the ears) of the other.

Marica Bodrožić (born in 1973 in Zadvarje/ Dalmatia), author, translator and filmmaker, teaches at schools and universities on behalf of the Goethe-Institut. Bodrožić has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Grenzgänger scholar­ship by the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Initiativpreis Deutsche Sprache, and the European Union ­Prize for Literature. Her most recent book Das Auge hinter dem Auge (The Eye behind the Eye) was published in 2015 by the Otto Müller Verlag.

Nicol Ljubić (born in 1971 in Zagreb/Yugoslavia) grew up in Sweden, Russia and Germany.

He studied Political Science and is now a freelance journalist and author. He has received several awards, including the Adelbert von Chamisso ­Prize. His most recent book Als wäre es Liebe (As If It Were Love) was published in 2012 by Hoffmann und Campe.

Marjana Gaponenko (born in 1981 in Odessa/ Ukraine), studied German Studies and has been writing in German since the age of 16. She has received a number of literary awards, including the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize. Her most recent book Strohhalm in Luzifers Schweif (A Piece of Straw in Lucifer’s Tail) was published by edition miromente in 2015.

An ASSESSMENT of Father’s INTEGRATION

by Nicol ­ Ljubić

There is a survey which can be used to determine how well immigrants are integrated in Germany. I’d like to ask you a few of these questions, just for fun ...

I’m integrated, very integrated.

Well, maybe not and you just don’t know it.

I’ve been living in this country for more than 50 years. I also have a German passport. It cost me 750 marks, that was heap of money back then.

Are you ready? Can I begin?

Fine with me. You’ll see.

When exactly did you come to Germany?

In November 1962.

What’s your country of origin?

You know that. Yugoslavia.

What kind of education do you have?

I’m a trained automotive electrician, but you know that, too.

Do you know your rights as an immigrant?

I’ve got all the rights. I’m German after all – as German as you get.

What’s your opinion regarding the death penalty?

If we had the death penalty, there’d be fewer criminals.

So you’re for it?

Whoever rapes and murders little children belongs on the electric chair.

You do realise that it’s against the constitution, don’t you?

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. I’m sure most people do.

Do you know what your responsibilities are?

The most important thing is punctuality. And following the rules. No mowing grass between two and three in the afternoon. The neighbours used to respect that, but now that foreigners are living here, no one follows that rule anymore. They mow whenever they want. And no asking for a free ride, that’s also a rule. No one ever gave me anything. When I came to Germany, I worked at a car dealership. Installed blinkers for weeks. The German colleagues were annoyed with me because I did more in an hour than they did in three. And after work, I went to another dealership and worked until the middle of the night fixing up cars that were damaged in accidents.

I never received a cent from the government. Like I always say, you gotta give people work, not money for doing nothing.

Should migrants, who decide to live in Germany, have to learn German?

It comes down to language. If you can’t speak the lan­ guage, they treat you like an idiot. That’s why I’ve always

told you since you were a kid: learn German! That’s the most important thing. And be good in school!

How good is your language proficiency on a scale from 1 to 10 ...

10.

But I always had to write your letters because you had problems with spelling, and even after 50 years, you still say ‘der Strasse’ instead of ‘die Strasse’ and when some­one irks you, you say they’re a ‘pin’ in the neck. You get upset when salespeople in stores sometimes don’t understand you, but – to be honest – it’s not always so easy. If you ask me, I’d give you a six on the scale.

But no one’s asking you.

But if you have a ten, what do I have?

Also a 10. Even though you got a D in German on your report card once.

I remember, especially because you didn’t speak to me for two days.

Because I still don’t understand it. German is your native language, how can you get a D on your report card?

Let’s move on to the next question: Should migrants who decide to remain in Germany have German friends?

Yes. I’ve only got German friends. And just our relatives alone! Your mother’s brother, sister, the other brother. And the bowling club. Bernd, Klaus, Gustav and the other bowling buddies.

Should migrants who decide to stay in Germany keep their own traditions and customs?

Rather not. Just think, the Greeks, they say avrio when they have to do something, and avrio means ‘tomorrow’, avrio is avrio, and with that mindset you won’t get very far in Germany. Does food belong to customs?

I think so.

Well that’s important, I mean pickled pork knuckles and lobscouse – that’s not my thing. I miss my sister’s palatschinken*, the ones with nuts, I’d give anything for those.

When your mother makes pancakes, it’s like sponge cake.

And slivovic. When I’m in Croatia, I always have to bring a bottle to all the neighbours. I used to distil my own ­slivovic in the bathtub, the whole house stank of alcohol, and then everyone came knocking, Klaus, Hartmut, the whole neighbourhood. ‘Ivo!’ they used say, ‘no one makes better schnapps than you!’

Should migrants who decide to remain in Germany have to become acquainted with German culture?

That’s what I do every day in front of the TV. I like ‘Der Alte’, I don’t like Schimanski, no German police officer could get away with such manners, they’d be kicked out in a second. I enjoy watching ‘Plusminus’, they have tips on how to save energy, for example, and last time they tested organic foods and found out that it’s a bunch of baloney, it’s no better than normal meat.

29 Have you ever gone to the theatre? Have you read ­Goethe or Schiller?

I went to the Reeperbahn once, to a cabaret, but that was a long time ago. I read books by Konsalik and Simmel, they’re both dead now, too.

Have you ever felt discriminated against as a migrant?

I’m not a migrant, I’m German, through and through.

Have you ever felt discriminated against as a German, ‘through and through’?

Your mother and I were looking for a flat, must have been fifty years ago, and back then I couldn’t speak German. The landlord noticed and said: A foreigner, no way!

And then your mother was angry that I had opened my mouth. Back then we were living in a parcelled garden hut – one room, kitchen, no running water and instead of a toilet we had a pot.

Why did you come to Germany in the first place?

My older brother had left Yugoslavia before me, he lived in Martigues and had found work and wrote how great things were for him. I wanted to go where he was and ­dreamt of a better life. I received political asylum in France, that was no problem back then. I got work at a junkyard and then I moved to Germany in 1962 because I had met your mother.

What expectations did you have of Germany?

I wanted to work. That’s all. That’s how it is when you enter a country and have nothing, you start from the bottom. But I made something of my life. And look around – we have a house of our own, a car, we’ve always taken holidays, you’ve gone to university. You have everything.

And nobody treats you like an idiot because you can’t speak the language.

But I do have this last name which doesn’t sound German. And sometimes people ask me where I learned to speak such good German.

Son, you have a German passport, your mother is German, you went to German school.

Then again, I can’t speak Croatian. I can’t even communicate with my Croatian family. And when I’m in Croatia and people see my name, they can’t believe that I’m unable to speak their language.

I wanted you to speak German. We live in Germany and will be staying in Germany, and in Germany, they speak German. What use is Croatian to you here?

But this is about not being ashamed of one’s back­ ground. The fact that we have family in Croatia is part of our background. That’s why it was important to me that your grandchildren received your last name so that they’re aware that their grandpa was born in another country. And so that Germany gets used to the fact that Germans can also be called Özbek or Aziz or Kovač like us.

Son, do you have any problems in this country? You’re doing just fine.

But you also have to get involved. Integration means participation, not accepting everything quietly.

Son, be content with what you have. I’ve never com­ plained. I never stirred up trouble either. Not once was I ever late for work. And when I do something, I do it right. My work’s never shoddy.

But it’s not about being just like the Germans. That’s assimilation. It’s about understanding one another beyond cultural and language barriers. And not giving up your identity.

I don’t know what your problem is. Really, I don’t. You were born here. You’re not Croatian, you can’t even speak the language. What identity are you giving up? Whether you like it or not, you’re German, through and through, just as much as I am. Maybe even a little more so.

From LITERARY Scholar to TELEPATH

by Marjana Gaponenko Dedicated to Lord Weidenfeld Monday, 8 September 2081 Very elegantly and hunched with age, he descends the hotel staircase – the dinosaur of German literature. The white carnation in the lapel of his blazer, a symbolic bridge to nature, swings exuberantly. Like no one else, Gustav Hennings lets his romantic streak shine through in his numerous poems, novels and plays, despite the topicality of his themes. The darkskinned parlour maid, standing in a corner, plucking the wilted petals from a gigantic ball of freesia, seems to realise that he is the one the many journalists have been waiting for in the hotel lobby. The young woman finds it difficult not to beam from ear to ear. Gustav Hennings winks at her as he passes. The cameras click madly. Seldom does the Grand Seigneur rub elbows with the public. He has long retreated from the limelight, and if it weren’t for the state banquet in honour of his 100th birthday, he would have likely spent the day far from the bustle of the capital – either outdoors with his favourite four-legged friends or conducting a telepathy experiment in his bunker. The Nobel laureate for Literature financed the bunker with his prize money several decades earlier. And thus he bid a grand farewell to the world of words. He dug the hole for the bunker in his garden himself at the age of 82.

MG Mr Hennings, how does it feel to be honoured as a literary scholar with a state banquet even though you moved on to other pastures long ago?

H Hennings: I’m torn. On the one hand, such a state banquet is a fine affair and I’d be lying if I claimed I didn’t care whether or not the German government honoured my literary outpourings of the past. No, I’m looking forward to it, even with childish pleasure, and wish I could tell everyone who had ever cheered me on and predicted this day would come, but unfortunately they’re all long gone. On the other hand, I am a bit annoyed.

MG Indeed, this honour was long in coming.

H It’s a pity that my oeuvre has been attributed more weight than my work in the field of non-verbal communication. Personally, I no longer regard myself as a literary scholar or as one belonging to the intellectual realm, at least not in the humanistic sense of the word. My intellectual realm is not the written word, rather it is real and can be investigated in controlled experimentation. And in the evening, this realm occasionally hides in my liquor cabinet. (laughs) MG In your liquor cabinet? What exactly do you mean by that?

H You see, we both offer evidence for the existence of a phenomenon which isn’t one: thought transmission which one would describe as being on the same wavelength. Either you’re connected or not.

MG Are you saying that sense of humour must have something to do with telepathy?

H Exactly, just like verbal communication incidentally. Without a resonant portion of telepathy, people would probably talk past one another.

MG You, formerly a man of the written word, now conduct research in this field.

H The basis of research was established around one hundred years ago by the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who, after a brief flirt with fame, quickly passed out of memory. And like him, I too advocate having telepathy recognised in the science community and do not hesitate, despite my Bechterev’s, to defend my theories in public. Unfortunately, the materialistic view still dominates our planet.

MG Would you care to summarise your message for our readers again?

H The existence of telepathy is evidenced by the fact that so-called consciousness is not limited to within the mind, but expands out in time and space.

What we need is to rethink our understanding of the world.

* Translator's note: crepe-like pancakes

MG Aren’t you worried that this rethink could have serious consequences?

30 H

Is there any other alternative? If Einstein had researched with such an approach, we’d be in a completely different place now. What is worse is the ignorance with which the natural sciences dismiss the evidence provided by the population as humbug and illusion. This is highly unscientific. The question is: why do we research, for the pure pleasure of it or because we want to know? Where has the Darwinian proximity to the public of centuries past gone to? My great-grandfather was born in 1904. He lived at a time when every cook was obsessed with science. It was normal to believe in progress. People today unfortunately know nothing of this pleasurable feeling. I knew it when I was a boy playing rocket ship, sitting in a cardboard box with my playmates, my heart pounding as we reenacted the first moon landing.

MG Astounding, the kind of historical tradition you come from. Do you believe the idea of progress is still relevant in modern times?

H Naturally. There is no doubt in my mind that humankind’s greatest discoveries lie ahead. Science must expand its boundaries and must not get bogged down in pure dogmatism.

MG What happens in a typical telepathy experiment in your bunker?

H I go down, lie down on the sofa, lie there for a while with my eyes closed, think about one of my animals up above and establish contact.

MG Your animals are out of range of vision and hearing?

H We’re separated by seven metres of earth and concrete walls. And I lie there in my tomb, and ask my goat, for instance, to walk to the fence and wait for me there. And indeed, my assistant observes how it hurries over to the fence at that exact moment. In a larger experiment, the goat stays in the bunker, while from above I tell it not to stand around forever, but make itself comfortable on the sofa, but facing the wall.

MG Have you ever sensed manifestations of telepathy yourself?

H Of course, I know all too well how it feels. When I was a young literary scholar, I had to live from the publication of my works. Back then books were printed. You received money in exchange for them. Once I sent a manuscript of a novel to my publisher, hoping he’d accept it. Months went by and then a letter arrived. The day before, I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth – back then we had to do it manually. Then, suddenly, it hit me: tomorrow you will receive a rejection letter in an envelope with an uncancelled stamp. And that’s exactly what happened – an example of precognition. I used the stamp again, by the way.

MG Was it then that you stopped writing?

H No, that was thirty years later. I happened to come across one of my books.

It was a novel, published in the first decade of the century, that told the story of a biologist who was convinced of the existence of a universal, multi-species primal language. I paged through it, remembering how I began, and suddenly knew that what I had written was complete nonsense. The chirping of birds, the meowing of cats and the language of humans have absolutely nothing to do with one another. It’s a waste of time looking for a common root.

MG You haven’t published anything since then.

H I couldn’t write anymore. Those were wearing years of doubt and brooding.

I moved away from the city into the country and began observing animals.

Eventually I bought two horses. They showed me that complex information in the wild is not communicated via sounds or body language, but rather telepathically. Not only is telepathy efficient, it’s vital for survival. I realised how bad off we are with our verbal ramblings and what a precious gift we’ve thrown away over the course of evolution, neglected, to be more exact, ever since our hunting ancestors settled down. Our languages have evolved out of pure boredom and smothered our ability to use telepathy.

MG Is it such a bad thing that we’ve developed further?

H Not further – just differently. There is no reason to be proud of it. If people took the findings of my research seriously, one would arrive at an expanded concept of time and space. This could result in a new level of discussion or perspective for addressing all of our global challenges. The present focus on linear, temporal-historical processes and impacts plays right into the hands of demagogues and populists.

MG Mr Hennings, thank you for speaking with us.

globale° – Festival for Cross-Border Literature 2016 “Finding oneself beyond borders”

The literature festival “globale°” attracts numerous writers every year who write in German even though German is not their native language. The organisers wish to expand in this direction by holding additional events which more strongly focus on cross-border cooperation. Their aim is to highlight the increasing internationalisation evident in German-language literature as a phenomenon in a pan-European and even global context. Against this background, they have invited authors from the largest French literature festival “Étonnants Voyageurs” to Bremen whose works represent francophone “world literature” from French-speaking regions around the world, be it Maghreb, West Africa, Quebec, the Caribbean or Europe. In addition, the festival organisers wish to intensify collaboration with the Dutch Stichting Literaire Activiteiten Groningen, an international platform for writers, cultural artists and literary enthusiasts, as well as artists from Czechia.

Artistic director: Elisabeth Arend, Libuše Černá (CZ) Writers: Maria Cecillia Barbetta (DE/AR), Artur Becker (DE/PL), Marica Bodrožić (DE/HR), Dimitré Dinev (AT/BG), Dante Andrea Franzetti (CH), Marjana Gaponenko (UA), Arnon Grunberg (NL), Nicol Ljubić (DE/HR), José F. A. Oliver (DE/ES), Jaroslav Rudiš (CZ), Boualem Sansal (DZ), Saša Stanišić (DE/BA), Yōko Tawada (DE/ JP) and others Bremen, Bremerhaven, Oldenburg: 28 Oct.–14 Nov. 2016 ↗ www.globale-literaturfestival.de

In g l o u r i o u s P O E T S for German Commemo r a t i v e T H E AT R E

31

32 Ms Salzmann, Mr Czollek, you are both young Jews living in Germany. We also see many young Israelis moving to Berlin. On the other hand, such authors as Mirna Funk and Yascha Mounk have written books about how and why they’ve decided to leave Germany.

Is being Jewish in Germany a burden?

Czollek: Let me be very Jewish and start with a joke I got from Sasha. Question: Why don’t Jews take pain relievers?

Answer: Because it could make the pain go away! Being Jewish is always a burden. That’s why living in Germany isn’t really a problem, it’s actually extraordinarily Jewish.

At the individual level, Jews do ask themselves what type of conflicts they are willing or unwilling to endure.

Salzmann: People in Germany can’t even say the word “Jew” without wincing for fear of what it could imply, an insult, a reference to the victims, or the perpetrators. So this might be a burden to others, but it isn’t for me. When talking to people, wearing the Star of David around my neck and with my open attitude to my culture, I’m often confronted with the question of how much further we must go to achieve normalisation. But getting there is worth it.

How does your self-image differ from that of your parents?

Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Max Czollek on Jewish identities in Germany

Czollek: When I compare myself to my parents’ generation, I would say our perspectives and objectives are not all that different. Perhaps I have less of that fear which is expressed by the stereotypical packed suitcase or bolted locks on the door. But there’s something else that plays a central role: I’ve been socialised in Jewish institutions – from the first grade to the thirteenth grade at the Jewish School in Berlin and then again near the end of my studies and for the entire duration of my doctoral programme. This is a situation which has not existed in Germany since the Second World War. Salzmann: My parents lost their jobs for being Jewish, they were physically attacked and politically persecuted. They didn’t want us children to be confronted with this reality and so they tried to walk the fine line between assimilating and cocooning themselves in what they were familiar with.

They didn’t consciously distance themselves from other cultural circles. They lived as Jews among Jews, that was the nature of the beast, as they say, in the Soviet Union. In any case, that’s what they told me – it was a position I was quite sceptical of. For my part, I wished that we were all internationalists, cosmopolitans that didn’t need any markings, any labels for what we are, and that we could come together as human beings. But I hadn’t had any experience with structural exclusion in everyday life, it was “only” a tale I heard from my parents. That all changed as soon as I came to Germany.

Ms Salzmann, you frequently refer to ‘shifting personalities’ to best describe contemporary ­identities. Yet at the same time, you identify yourself as a Jew. Is this a constant in a continually shifting identity?

Salzmann: Being Jewish is the opposite of a constant, perhaps it applies to all identities – I can only speak for my own. There is no Jewish culture per se, but there are Jewish cultures. I’m an atheist, I have no connection to Israel, I grew up with Yiddish, mainly with the Chochmes and Jewish literature. We didn’t celebrate Shabbat, but we received the dreidel and mezuzah on almost every occasion. It wasn’t easy to carry out circumcisions in the Soviet Union, but klezmer music was always playing in our flat. A very special Jewish creation which I was able to make my own. What I love about Jewish culture is that it’s not tied to any one country. It flourishes in the most diverse areas, takes on local customs and mixes with them. That’s part of the concept of ‘shifting personalities’. When it comes down to it, identity is a means of transportation and not a destination. My Yiddishness is the vehicle I travel with wherever I go.

What role does your Jewish background play in your life, Mr Czollek?

Czollek: I believe I can best understand my “Jewish” identity by viewing it in the context of how it was created.

As long as I was at a Jewish school, I went about the question of Judaism very differently than later on at a German university in a predominantly non-Jewish setting. At first I experienced this difference mainly in terms of varying family histories, then later as a difference in knowledge and perception. Who knows something about Jewish holidays? Who sees new buildings and thinks about the gaps left behind by the bombs?

Who notices the small GASAG markers on the sidewalk marked “Gas”? These things have nothing to do with “being Jewish” in the sense of a Jewish essence, but rather refer to a certain environment. That’s why it is no coincidence that my self-image differs from Sasha’s.

There is no such thing as the Jews.

In October 2015, Israeli artists living in Germany gathered together for the first-ever “ID Festival”, which was subtitled “In search of new traditions of German-Israeli identity”. How does this relate to “Disintegration”, which specifically levels criticism at the new “German-Jewish Us”?

Czollek: I think both sides are valid in Germany – the hyphenic assertion (Israeli-German) and the criticism of being Jewish for Germans. For Jewish Israelis it’s interesting, especially with respect to the political weight Germany carries in Israel, to explore the possibilities of a German-Israeli identity. The concept of disintegration, however, evolved from a background of socialisation as a Jew in Germany. “The Jews” in Germany have an unusual problem: they are too important! Not only has the extermination of the Jews become the pars pro toto of the heinous crimes of National Socialism, the memory has also established itself as a (national) German paradigm of commemoration and identity. “The Jews” have become a central element in the construct of a modern German non-National Socialist identity.

As a “Jew”, I fulfil certain requirements for Germans when I speak out against anti-Semitism, state my position to Israel, recite the Kaddish when a “Stolperstein”* is laid, or put my arm around Germans because they’re grieved about their SS grandpa or the deeds of the German people.

Salzmann: You see, I have a problem with equating Jews with Israelis. As far as I know, many people live in Israel – not only Jews – but whenever there’s an event which should display unity regarding certain historical processes, for example, guilt and forgiveness, Jews are the only ones who are meant, and I don’t want to be a part of it. I can’t say anything about the German-Israeli identity, because I cannot join the conversation about the kind of “new traditions” these two countries wish to develop together. The “Disintegration” congress will disrupt the desire for harmony in this homogeneous narrative, and I’m looking forward to that. At the congress, I’ll be interested in showing the diversity that comes with the label “JEW”, those unnoticed moments, the surprises, the marginalia. I regard our congress not as criticism of the “German-Jewish Us”, because frankly I’m not familiar with such a thing.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Germany and Israel, the German Federal President Joachim Gauck said that there is no German identity without Auschwitz as there is no ­Israeli identity without the Shoah. Is there a Jewish identity without the Shoah?

Czollek: Look, the Shoah is used for many things, also in pop culture. When I conduct a poetry workshop, I sometimes do an exercise on primary associations. I tell the participants they’re not allowed to use words in their poems which are most commonly mentioned (for instance, for “love” they shouldn’t use words like red, heart, pain etc.). The Shoah also evokes a similar chain of associations, just think of barbed wired, emaciated people, violins and cattle cars. What I want is to see these images in a functional relationship with a

33 commemorative culture, constructed by the German majority society. But this society has a problem coming to terms with its own memories and positions of its perpetrators. For the Shoah is also a carrier of a multitude of personal associations which probably vary significantly. By means of disintegration, we mean to gain a clearer view of the diverse references that are possible. To put it more pointedly, I’m interested in finding a language to express one’s own history which is not a reaction to the desires of the perpetrators’ ­descendants and their struggle to create a positive self-image.

Salzmann: Half my life I grew up in a society which didn’t consider the Shoah as integral to Jewish identity. It sounds absurd, for being the “victor of war against fascism” should also include the Shoah, but in fact, what was done to the Jews was no more important than what happened to the communists in the Holocaust. It’s a shift in perspective, a different focus, one always looks for a fitting narrative for one’s role as a victim so as to instrumentalise it for one’s purposes. There are many countries in the former Soviet Union which played an active role in the Holocaust. Today, not only do they fail to reexamine this dark chapter in their history, they don't even mention it in history classes. There is, however, knowledge about Jewish identity, and how!

In a taz interview (December 2015) Micha Brumlik attributed the political shift to the right in Jewish communities and in Israel with the arrival of Russian immigrants. There are few points of contact between the Jewish communities and the young Israelis in Germany. Is this a divide that runs along the former East and West German border, or is it rather a ­generational conflict?

Salzmann: I find it difficult if not impossible to verify Brumlik’s claim. Our ambivalences toward the viewpoints of Jewish communities today certainly have a historical continuity, but one has to also take a look at the changing times. Israel is a different country today than at the time it was founded, and the Russian Jews who have fled from their country arrive today with a different attitude than back then in 1948. In the same way that there is no such thing as a monolithic image of society, there cannot be a uniform image of community. Take for instance the relationship between German and Eastern European Jews before the Shoah: a mutually critical examination, an evaluation. Hierarchies were created which still linger today – the poor Yidden from the Shtetel and the affluent upper-class Jews from Western Europe. On the other hand, Israeli and Russian Jews sometimes harbour an unspoken accusation as to why and how the German and Eastern European Jews survived – who cooperated with whom to stay alive through the war, who drew up what lists and who was with the Resistance and who was a partisan. These are old wounds which none of us like talking about. But I wish to stress that it’s not simply the Russian Jews versus the Israelis or German Jews, it’s all of us who willingly play a part in the divide et impera policies of a hegemonic discourse.

Czollek: Yes, I completely agree with Sasha and would like to add that the narrative and other resources which have come with the waves of immigration from the former Soviet Union and Israel have yet to be adequately addressed and incorporated into the public position of Jewish communities and Jewish society in Germany. If the Soviet-Jewish perspective is “We won the war,” that’s very interesting because it implies that Jews who say this no longer place themselves in the role of a victim, but rather victor. If Israelis want to build a German-Israeli culture, then suddenly they’re no longer victimised Jews who remained in Germany with a bad conscience, but rather Jews who wish to extend a hand to Germany. Jewish victors, Jewish avengers, Inglourious Basterds – such characters are immensely fascinating for ‘queering’ the German commemorative theatre!

One of the expressed aims of “Disintegration” is to forge alliances with other marginalised groups, such as Muslims. Does the experience of marginalisation play a larger role for the identity of young Jews in Germany than, for instance, religion or culture?

strategies of infiltration, gang formation and queer positions, and then search for new narratives. These narratives shouldn’t conceal the status quo, but rather address it in a progressive fashion.

Salzmann: Marginalisation can be a part of culture – not that I think it’s a good thing, but constantly dealing with exclusion inscribes itself into the performance of a culture. I do believe that the experience of exclusion can bring the affected groups closer together in reflecting on structural discrimination and fighting against it. Exclusion can take place at many different levels, it can also occur because of gender or economic identity. The “Disintegration” congress is a broad-based invitation to form new alliances. Ethnic background only plays a limited role; it’s about the will to actively develop, rethink and redefine people’s self-images.

Czollek: Of course, the congress is context-based in terms of how it refers to the current situation and strives to be an intervention. I don’t think you can avoid it, and in fact, we don’t want to. I also don’t think that this juxtaposition is correct – either us Jews for us, or us Jews for Germans! The congress is an exercise in being Jewish, a search for a language and an imaginative space to

Czollek: As we mentioned earlier, I assume that Jews in Germany after 1945, as well as those growing up in the late 1970s, are in the very unique position of possessing an unusually close connection to German identity.

There is something very tempting about the material and social recognition that comes with being “Jewish for Germans”. I think we should sit down with other marginalised groups and discuss what alternatives there are to such co-opting and what experiences they have gained in and with the German majority society. But with regard to allies, it’s not only marginalised groups we’re referring to, but also allies from the majority culture.

The term “post-migrant”, as you, Ms. Salzmann, have used it on one occasion, describes “an existence in marginalisation without having to have ‘come from anywhere’”. In an interview, writer Olga Grjasnowa claimed that she could only speak for the generation of “young, over-privileged, white people”. Marginalised and privileged – don‘t these traits cancel each other out anymore?

Czollek: I would even say – they never have! We’re all comprised of different aspects – we all have an (assigned) gender, skin colour, economic status, religion, age and medical history. Even if I happen to be privileged in all of these areas, they will eventually change with relative certainty, because I’m getting older, I might have an accident or lose my job. The basis of disintegration is recognising the role of diversity and independence for a functioning democratic order.

Salzmann: “Shifting personalities” also means “shifting contexts”. I would definitely have to be aware of my privileges living somewhere like Turkey where I could enter and leave the country with my German passport anytime I wanted, while my friends with Turkish citizenship could never leave. You can never take your own position for granted, you have to continuously renegotiate it and then decide for yourself what perspective you wish to take before it’s decided for you.

Nonetheless, belonging to a hegemonic order isn’t something I can decide for or reject. Marginalisation is a radical, social mechanism of exclusion. It’s not a question of identity that determines whether one is marginalised or not, it’s an existential one.

It seems paradoxical. Isn’t the discussion about “real experiences of marginalisation” which “Disintegration”, after all, wishes to address, likewise a construction of identity within the German-Jewish problem?

Can one prevent being perceived and defined as a victim in this way?

Salzmann: Addressing real experiences of marginalisation is a necessary step in the process of self-empowerment. That certainly doesn’t mean that we’re initiating a discourse of victimhood. For people who are actively affected by racism, anti-Semitism, chauvinism and any form of contempt, their everyday experience is not an intellectual construction that one can d­ ecipher.

At the congress, we’ll be developing and discussing

Des­integration Congress on contemporary Jewish positions

What is the common denominator of Jewish identity? Are Jews a religious community, an ethnic group or a group of victims?

The congress at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin wishes to explore these questions and create a space of self-reflection where participants can discuss the issue of Jewish identity. The event brings together a wide array of groups which live in Germany: immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Israel, Jewish German survivors of the Holocaust and those who returned from exile. With its motto “Disintegration”, the organisers consciously reject popular social attributes and aim to distance themselves from the foreign constructs which appeared in Germany after 1945. The provocative motto is in line with the innovative and confrontational approach of the congress. For example, the first topic of the podium discussion is “Exorcism: Can the German and Jewish souls ever be separated?” The programme features a diverse range of formats, including readings, debates, performances, workshops, Thora discussions and concerts.

The initiators also expressly invite the non-Jewish public to participate and hope to attract a large, widely diverse audience.

This openness is reflected in the choice of venue and the political position of the Maxim Gorki Theater.

Artistic directors: Max Czollek, Sasha Marianna Salzmann With: Yael Almog (IL), Idil Baydar, Ljudmilla Belkin (DE/UA), ­Yevgeniy Breyger, Leah Carola Czollek & Gudrun Perko (AU), Johannes Frank, Marina Frenk (DE/MD), Michel Friedman (DE/ FR), Alexander ­Grodensky, Yuriy Gurzhy (DE/UA), Cecilia (IT) und Yair Haendler (IL), Sapir Heller (DE/IL), Tobias Herzberg, Liad Hussein (DE/US/IL/PS), Daniel Kahn (DE/US), Ijoma Mangold, Hannah Peaceman, Mehmet Yılmaz, Deniz Utlu Studio Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin: 6–8 May 2016 ↗ www.theater-findet-stadt.de

34 critically examine what Jewish identity in Germany can mean. The juxtaposition of us and them is absolutely necessary for conducting such a search, but it’s only a performative assertion that ultimately fulfils a strategic function. There is no us, but we assert a counter-­position to the majority culture and make it visible as German.

German commemorative culture keeps the memory of the victims of the Holocaust alive as it does the memory of perpetration. Has it become counterproductive in the meantime? How would you like to change it?

Czollek: I’m not interested in changing the present circumstances as I am in the perspectivation. German commemorative culture reflects the process of self-examination of the majority society, which discusses its own perpetrator’s position. That doesn’t mean that the “victims” don’t play a role – on the contrary, they play a very important role on the German commemorative stage.

And this role limits the possibilities of what a Jewish take on their own history could signify. What would I change?

I would more strongly emphasise the diversity of memories and narratives in a pluralistic Jewish community and compare them with the established interaction between certain Jews/Jewish institutions and a certain German commemorative culture. The result of such juxtaposition would be a public awareness of the diversity of Jewish identities in Germany.

Salzmann: I’m very sceptical of German commemorative culture because for me it often doubles as a proxy debate in which people use arguments to deflect attempts to talk about structural racism in Germany. The logic I’m always being confronted with is: We can’t be racists because we’ve addressed the Holocaust against the Jews. Put very simply. Such instrumentalisations are brutal and indicate the obscuration of two things: firstly, that racism is a structural problem on which our entire society is based and from which it profits. It would collapse if we paid reparations to every country in which we participated in genocide. And secondly, that society cannot collectively process anti-Semitism and be done with it. It is a part of the foundation of the society in which we live. I’d wish it would be a ­topic of permanent discussion. Checking it off as “all done” is not enough.

The questions were posed by Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel to the artistic directors of the Disintegration congress. * Translator’s note: “Stolpersteine” are cobblestone-sized blocks made of brass, imprinted with the names of victims of National Socialism, inserted into the sidewalks in front of their former homes in cities throughout ­Germany.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann, born in Volgograd in 1985, received the Vienna Wortstaetten Prize for her first play “White Bread Music” in 2009. She has since written numerous texts for the stage, including “Muttersprache Mameloschn” (Mother Tongue Mameloschn) and “Muttermale Fenster blau” (Birthmarks Window Blue), for which she was awarded the Mülheim Audience Prize and the Kleist Förderpreis. She worked as the co-editor of the culture and society magazine freitext, and from 2013 to 2015, directed Studio at Maxim Gorki Theater, where she now works as a house playwright.

The poet Max Czollek, born in Berlin in 1987, founded the Berlin writers’ collective G12 and was curator of the project “babelsprech”, devoted to networking young German-­language poets. In addition to diverse publications in journals, anthologies and the Internet, he also produced two volumes of poetry, “Druckkammern” (Pressure Chambers) and “Jubeljahre” (Jubilees, 2012 and 2015 respectively, published by Verlagshaus J. Frank, today: Verlagshaus Berlin). Since the 2013/14 season, Max Czollek has worked as curator of the poetry series “Gegenwartsbewältigung” (Coping with the Present) for the Maxim Gorki Theater. He recently received his doctorate at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the TU Berlin.

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NEW P r o j e c t s After meeting in joint session in autumn 2015, the interdisciplinary jury of the Federal Cultural Foundation recommended funding for 30 new projects with a total volume of 4.57 million euros.

You can find detailed information about the individual projects on our website www.kulturstiftung-bund.de or on the websites operated by the respective project coordinators. The submission deadline for the next round of applications to General Funding is 31 July 2016.

The members of the jury (28th ­session) are: Joachim Gerstmeier, director of the performing arts department at the Siemens Foundation / Dr. Angelika ­Nollert, director of the Neue Sammlung – The I­nternational Design Museum Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne / Dr. Andreas Rötzer, publisher and managing director of Matthes & Seitz Berlin publishing house / Albert Schmitt, managing director of the German Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra in Bremen / Gisela Staupe, deputy director of the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden / Karsten Wiegand, general theatre director of the Staatstheater Darmstadt

STADTLAND: Church Unconventional thinkers for T ­ huringia in 2017

There are nearly 2,000 Protestant churches in Thuringia which are registered as historic monuments and preserved with an enormous amount of public involvement. Especially since 1990, numerous churches have been safeguarded, renovated and re-appropriated for various uses. But what happens if the number of parishioners continues to shrink and church buildings can no longer be used for religious purposes due to demographic and social developments? How do we best deal with vacant buildings of cultural-historic significance? An international, open call for ideas will be launched to find answers to these questions. A curatorial board consisting of artists, photographers and architects will help spread the word internationally and later review the submitted proposals. The results will be presented in Thuringia during the Luther commemorative year in 2017, as well as at the world exhibition of the Reformation in Luther’s city of Wittenberg. The idea competition will be accompanied by other artistic works which address the same issue. Following the conclusion of the project, outstanding proposals for converting and reutilising the buildings will be implemented as part of the IBA Thüringen from 2018 to 2023.

Artistic directors: Sonja Beeck, Detlef Weitz / chezweitz Curatorial board: Architecture: Barbara Holzer Landscape design: Marc Pouzoul Communication design: Tom Unverzagt Journalism: Florian ­Heilmeyer Photography: Anne ­Schönharting Performing arts: Jürg Montalta Applied Arts: Barbara Steiner EKM / Theology: Christian Fuhrmann Artist: Carsten Nicolai Cooperating partners: IBA Thüringen, IBA Parkstadt / Niederlande, IBA Heidelberg, IBA Basel Kaufmannskirche Erfurt: 13 May–19 Nov. 2017; Limburg (NL) und Heidelberg: 13 May–19 Nov. 2017; village and city churches of Thuringia: 14 May–22 Oct. 2017; Kaufmannskirche ­Erfurt (three IBA Salons): 14 Jun.–18 Oct. 2017; Wittenberg (world exhibition on the Reformation): 20 May–10 Sep. 2017 ↗ www.ekmd.de

Ellen Cantor Retrospective

The American artist Ellen Cantor (1963–2013) addressed questions concerning faith, identity and love in her works. Cantor applies a wide range of media to examine the aesthetic and political limits of sexuality and love, autonomy and resistance. In her drawings, performances, films, photos and texts, she repeatedly explores the question of how female desire can be imagined and represented.

The exhibition “Ellen Cantor”, a joint project by the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and the CCA Wattis in San Francisco, is the first retrospective of Cantor’s work. Numerous pieces will be shown publicly for the first time. The full-length version of Cantor’s central cinematic work “Pinochet Porn”, which tells the story of five children who grew up under the regime of the Chilean dictator, will be shown for the first time in cinemas in Stuttgart and San Francisco. An extensive event programme of readings, performances, workshops and a symposium will accompany the exhibition and offer visitors the chance to speak with international theorists and artists on the subjects of gender, sexuality and politics.

Artistic director: Fatima Hellberg (SE) Curators: Fatima Hellberg (SE), Jamie Stevens (US) Artists / Researchers: Lauren ­Berlant (US), Ellen Cantor (US), Pedro Cid Proença (PT), John ­Cussans (UK), Lia Gangitano (US), Joseph ­Grigley (US), Catherine Malabou (FR) The Wattis Institute, San Francisco: 8 Dec. 2015–13 Feb. 2016; ­Künstlerhaus Stuttgart: 2­ Apr.–31 Jul. 2016 ↗ www.kuenstlerhaus.de

Franz Marc – The Tower of Blue Horses A missing masterpiece

In 1913, Franz Marc articulated what many now regard as a portent of the First World War in his painting “The Tower of Blue Horses”. The painting, a masterpiece of German Expressionism, became the property of the Berlin Nationalgalerie in 1919 and was one of the museum’s major attractions during the Weimar Republic. Although stigmatised by the Nazis as “Degenerate Art”, it survived the Second World War unscathed and was last sighted in Berlin-Zehlendorf in 1948. Since then its whereabouts have become a matter of speculation.

Seventy years later, the Haus am Waldsee has decided to make the unknown fate of the painting the subject of an artistic, scientific and literary research project. Ten internationally renowned artists have been invited to reflect on the work, its history and fate in painting (Norbert Bisky, Christian Jankowski, Katharina Grosse), drawing (Marcel van Eeden, Martin Assig), sculpture and installation (Via Lewandowsky, Birgit Brenner), film ( Julian Rosefeldt), photography (Thomas Demand) and literature (Julia Franck) from today’s point of view and in dialogue with leading art scholars. All of the works will focus on the central themes of transition, disappearance, rediscovery and reassessment.

The curators regard the exhibition as a contribution to the international scientific debate on looted art. Museum goers will be confronted not only with known facts, but also possible scenarios. Ideally, the entire event and resulting publicity will lead to the recovery of the “Tower of Blue Horses”.

Artistic director: Katja Blomberg Artists: Marcel van Eeden (NL), ­Norbert Bisky, Via Lewandowsky, Birgit Brenner, Martin Assig, Christian Jankowski, Julian Rosefeldt, Julia Franck, Thomas Demand, Katharina Grosse Haus am Waldsee, Berlin: 9 Dec. 2016–12 Mar. 2017; Museum van Boijmans Beuningen, Rotterdam: 7 Sep.–27 Nov. 2017; Symposium: Haus am Waldsee, Berlin: 3–4 Mar. 2017 ↗ www.hausamwaldsee.de

Sticky Messages Anti-Semitic and racist stickers from 1880 to the present

In 1883 commuters on the Berlin suburban railway encountered the first stickers urging them “Don’t buy from Jews!”

And even today, stickers – depicting a

crossed-out mosque, for example – ­continue to deface public areas. The Anti-Semitism Research Centre is organising an exhibition titled “Sticky M ­ essages” which examines the function, historic development and global dissemination of a medium which, in addition to entertainment or marketing, has also served to cement anti-Semitic and racial prejudice. The exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum portrays how stickers have been used in varying political contexts since the 19th century to stoke resentment, and illustrates the visual manifestation of stereotypes and political propaganda.

In order to do justice to this broad subject, the project organisers have ­enlisted the support of a number of international partners, collectors and archives, including the Jewish Museums of Berlin and Frankfurt, a sticker museum in the United States, the archive of the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel and the Wiener Library in London. Based on this largely unexplored medium, the exhibition will present current positions and results of anti-Semitism and racism research – not isolated, but rather in the context of incited reactions of the offended minorities. In cooperation with the Deutsches Historisches Museum, the project will include an extensive ­accompanying programme with an ­international symposium, curator-guided tours and a film series.

Artistic directors: Isabel Enzenbach, Stefanie Schüler-­Springorum Deutsches Historisches Museum, ­Berlin: 20 Apr.–31 Jul. 2016 ↗ www.dhm.de

Heiner Goebbels. The Human Province Video sculpture / composition

A man exits the theatre, walks to the curb, gets into a car and drives home. In the sound and video installation “The Human Province”, we listen to and observe this man over a period of ten years doing the same ritual in nearly 50 cities in 25 countries. While driving through these cities, he describes his view of society based on passages taken from Elias Cannetti’s book “The Human Province”.

The main character in the sound and video installation of the same name by composer/director Heiner Goebbels is played by the French actor André Wilms. The long-term project will now be presented for the first time as a multimedia sculpture at the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau. The work is comprised of 54 successive film sequences featuring a polyphonic sound composition based on the soundscapes of the cities. The key motifs of the instal-

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Artist: Heiner Goebbels Curator: Hartwig Fischer Project team: Hilke Wagner, Gwendolin Kremer, Mathias Wagner Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Dresden: 15 Jan.–10 Apr. 2016 ↗ www.skd.museum.de

Human Possibility Bodies / Spheres / Devices

The human being has evolved into what we might call the “homo technicus”; technology impacts practically every aspect of modern life. Are we on the way to becoming a “techno-being”? Is it truly characteristic of humans to incessantly technologise their environment and themselves? And how does art respond to and reflect on technological advances?

The interdisciplinary exhibition project “Human Possibility” interweaves the spheres of art and technology and examines the relationship between the body and technical devices.

The exhibition starts by directing attention to our penchant for exploring the upper atmosphere by balloon since the 19th century, exemplifying the human desire to conquer the most hostile environments. Sixteen international artists will examine the phenotype of the “digital native” who has discovered his/her own body as a realm of possibility: from DNA spray to designer leg prostheses to implanted sensors and chips. The presentation of body art, performance art and bioart represents and critically examines the transformative potential of the mechan-ethical, transhuman being. The exhibition theme will be explored further in a film series and lectures by international sociologists, philosophers, theologians and cultural studies scholars.

Artistic directors: Claudia ­Emmert, Jörg Scheller, Jürgen Bleibler, Karen van den Berg, Maren Lehmann Curators: Friederica Ihling Artists: AES+F Group (RU), Art Orienté Objet (FR), Tim B ­ erresheim, Revital Cohen / Tuur Van Balen (GB), Mariechen Danz (IE), Heather Dewey-­Hagborg (US), Hiroshi Ishiguro (JP), Christian ­­ Jankowski, Eduardo Kac (BR), Eva Kotátková (CZ), Viktoria Modesta (LV), Marnix de Nijs (NL), Jon Rafman (CA), Sašo Sedlaček (SI), Ryan Trecartin (US)

Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen: 28 Apr.–9 Oct. 2016 ↗ www.zeppelin-museum.de

We Call It Ludwig The Museum Ludwig turns 40!

On 5 February 1976, Peter and Irene Ludwig signed an endowment contract with the city of Cologne which marked the beginning of the Museum Ludwig.

The couple donated 350 works of modern art to the city on the condition that the new museum in the heart of the city would bear their name. Since then the Museum Ludwig has defined itself by its collection, its history, and the people who have shaped it. It is fitting, therefore, that the theme of the large-scale commemorative exhibition “We Call It Ludwig” centres on the institution itself.

Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig and artistic director of the exhibition, has invited 24 international artists to reflect on what distinguishes the Museum Ludwig and what its future might hold. The exhibition will highlight the role of an art institution and the problems involved when addressing social issues of migration, post-colonialism, globalisation and cultural identity.

The project will develop ideas and strategies for a 21st-century museum, investigate the collection activities in the context of public and private interests, and offer new artistic perspectives of the museum as an institution. The exhibition will be accompanied by a multifaceted educational programme for selected target groups of various ages.

Artistic director: Yilmaz Dziewior Artists: Georges Adéagbo (BJ), Minerva Cuevas (MX), Maria Eichhorn, Andrea Fraser (US), Meschac Gaba (BJ), Hans Haacke, Pratchaya Phinthong (TH), Gerhard Richter, Avery Singer (US), Villa Design Group (GB) u. a.

Museum Ludwig, Cologne: 27 Aug. 2016–8 Jan. 2017 ↗ www.museum-ludwig.de

Rilke and Russia A research and exhibition project

The German Literature Archive in Marbach has made a name for itself in recent years by organising innovative exhibitions which surpass conventional literary exhibition concepts. In its newest project, it aims to present an extensive and detailed portrayal of Russia’s influence on the German poet Rilke who had taken two extended trips to Russia and Ukraine. The joint project between the Marbach archive, the State Literature Museum of the Russian Federation and the Swiss Literary Archives, together with numerous loans from private collections, promises to bring together a wealth of historic material unlike any before in its arrangement and preparation.

To what extent did Rilke serve as a cultural mediator and bridge-builder between the cultures?

As could be expected, the project surpasses the traditional frame of a literary exhibition in that it includes current photographic works by Barbara Klemm and Mirko Krizanovic. Krizanovic, along with the writer Ilma Rakusa and filmmaker Anastasia Alexandrowa, follow Rilke’s path through Russia and Ukraine and present a contemporary,

atmospheric panorama of that which strongly shaped Rilke’s attitudes and left evident traces behind in his work.

By integrating the works of these artists, the project hopes that viewers will regard the literary-historic items in the archive as pieces of art themselves. With their project, the organisers aspire to create an entirely new type of literary exhibition of extraordinary expressive value.

Artistic director: Thomas Schmidt Photographer: Mirko Krizanovic Writer: Ilma Rakusa (CH) Film ­director: ­Anastasia ­Alexandrowa (RU) Exhibition: Literaturmuseum der Moderne, Marbach: 1 Sep.–31 Dec. 2016; Conference: German Literature Archive, Marbach: 26–27 Jan. 2017; Exhibition: Zentrum Paul Klee, ­Berne: 1 Feb.–30 Apr. 2017; ­Conference: Swiss Literary Archives, Berne: 9–10 Mar. 2017; Exhibition: State L ­ iterature Museum, Moscow: 1 Jun.–30 Sep. 2017; Conference: Russian Literature Museum, Moscow: 8–9 Jun. 2017 ↗ www.dla-marbach.de

ME The self-portrait has long relinquished its position as an exclusive product of artistic subjectivity. Thanks to digital media and mobile technology, self-­portraits have become commonplace and available to everyone. What can art offer in response to these ubiquitous self-­portrayals? And how does it react to the alleged unity and representability of the subject which 20th-cen­ tury philosophers so vehemently repudiated?

© AES+F / Courtesy Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow & Triumph Gallery, Moscow

lation include listening, seeing, repetition, aging and the relationship between the individual and public space.

With its Old Masters’ Picture Gallery and the Albertinum, Dresden boasts a rich art-historical tradition, yet there are just a few exhibition venues for contemporary art. The organisers hope that the planned exhibition “The Human Province” in the Lipsiusbau in downtown Dresden will anchor such a venue more firmly in the public sphere. In this way, the Dresden State Art Collections will continue building on the progress made by the William Forsythe exhibition previously staged at the same venue, and encourage further interdisciplinary discourse on contemporary art.

AES+F Group, Last Riot 2, The Carrousel, 2007 / Digital Collage

37 dancer and choreographer Adam Linder.

Both artists have collaborated numerous times in the past; Nashat has developed various stage and performative sets for Linder and Linder has played the main character in a number of Nashat’s films.

In their joint projects, Linder and Nashat explore how stories in theatrical settings can be inscribed in an exhibition space, and investigate spaces in terms of their function as places of representation. A programme of lectures, films and performances will accompany the exhibition.

Artistic director: Kathleen Rahn Artists: Alexandra Bachzetsis (CH), Shahryar Nashat (CH), Adam ­Linder (AU), Vaginal Davis (US) u. a.

Kunstverein Hannover: 10 Jun.–28 Aug. 2016 ↗ www.kunstverein-hannover.de

Influenza

Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Köln/Berlin/New York, Photograph: Sven Laurent

European and Asian puppet theatre in a fever of discovery

Mark Leckey, Leckey Legs, 2014 The exhibition “ME” presents works by international artists that exemplify the iconoclastic process which the self-portrait genre is currently undergoing in contemporary art. The displayed works, ranging from conceptual pieces to photography, refuse to yield a representative reflection. The artists attempt to elude and ultimately escape the viewer. Günther Förg, for example, presents himself headless as he descends the stairs, Wolfgang Tillmans shows us just his knee, Paweł Althamer his clothes, Michael Sailstorfer forms his name in large letters, Sarah Lucas almost kicks the viewer in the face, while Florian Meisenberg can be observed via livestream from a smartphone. Although artistic subjectivity remains a leitmotif in contemporary art, we discover that it is no longer exclusively tied to the image of the artist.

Artistic director: Martina Weinhart Artists: Paweł Althamer (PL), Joseph Beuys, John Bock, Abraham Cruzvillegas (MX), Alicja Kwade (PL), Mark Leckey (GB), Sarah Lucas (UK), Jack ­Pierson (US), Dieter Roth (CH), Wolfgang ­Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel u. a.

Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main: 11 Mar.–29 May 2016 ↗ www.schirn.de

Bodies and Stages The performative present

The Federal Cultural Foundation has organised a dance congress in a different German city every three years since 2006. It is an event which has significantly contributed to improving the visibili-

ty of the German dance scene. On the occasion of the 2016 Dance Congress in Hannover, the exhibition “Bodies and Stages” at the Kunstverein Hannover will highlight the point of overlap between dance, performance and fine art. Two artistic positions form the centrepiece of the exhibition.

The artist Alexandra Bachzetsis isolates gestures and physical language from their typical contexts and deconstructs sequences of action which we are familiar with from everyday life or pop culture.

Her works impressively demonstrate how the body shakes itself free from culturally influenced gestures and creates autonomy. Bachzetsis will present cinematic and installative elements as well as a one-time performance. The Swiss ­artist Sharyar Nashat is developing an ­installation to serve as the stage of a ­performance by the Australian artist,

Western interest in Asian cultures not only introduces strange, foreign symbols into our culture. “What we can strive for in the Orient,” writes Roland Barthes, is “a difference, a mutation, a revolution in the character of the symbolic systems.” Through the encounter with Asian theatre forms, puppet theatre has the chance to discover its own roots; the oldest examples of this art form were developed in Asia. The variety of expressive forms ranges from Indian shadow and hand puppet theatre, to Vietnamese water marionette theatre to Japanese Bunraku which features almost life-size puppets. European puppeteers are becoming increasingly fascinated with these ancient performance traditions. At the same time, young theatre artists from India and China have been visiting Europe regularly for years and studying the history and aesthetics of puppet theatre traditions here.

This mutually infectious enthusiasm will be the theme of the special programme “Influenza” at the Bochum “Puppet Theatre of the Nations” festival in 2016. It invites representatives of traditional performance methods as well as European and Asian cross-over projects which have been influenced by the other’s cultures. The programme also includes several workshops and discussions which address the influence of European and Asian theatre language on contemporary puppet theatre. A documentary film programme will portray the beauty, but also the imminent loss of performance traditions which are passed down orally.

Artistic director: Annette Dabs Artists: Pavakathakali (IN), Tolu Bommalatta (IN), Anurupa Roy (IN), Yeung Faï (CN), Thanglong Water Puppet Theatre (VN), Papermoon Puppet Theatre (ID), Die Retrofuturisten and others Diverse venues, Bochum: 4–14 May 2016 ↗ www.fidena.de

38 My Truth Antony Hegarty / Anohni

The artistic oeuvre of the British artist Anohni, mainly known to German audiences as a musician under the name of Antony Hegarty, will be exhibited in Europe for the first time at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in 2016. Hegarty, whose works highlight the intersection of various media and art genres, has become an important symbol of identification for the transgender and transsexual movement in New York in the past decade. As an activist, she has been a strong advocate for minority rights. Exposing political and social ­inequalities is also a central theme of her artistic works. Hegarty occasionally ­supports radical ethical principles from which she creates art that doesn’t merely envision political goals, but works to make them happen.

This bipolarity in Hegarty’s life – her artistic endeavours on one hand and her political commitment on the other – is reflected in the concept of “My Truth”.

Anohni herself is the curator of the exhibition which will include works by Peter Hujar, James Elaine and Kazuo Ohno. In focussing on these three artists, she draws references to her own artistic work and the points of contact to other art genres.

The exhibition includes works by Anohni with which she highlights her political commitment. A symposium with a dance performance and concert will supplement the exhibition project which will be staged at additional venues in Europe.

Artistic director: Friedrich ­Meschede Artist: Antony Hegarty (GB) and others Kunsthalle Bielefeld: 23 Jul.–16 Oct. 2016 ↗ www.kunsthalle-bielefeld.de

How many truths fit into a human being?

For the very first time German audiences will have the opportunity to view pictures by Anohni in the exhibition “My Truth” at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. Many are already acquainted with Anohni’s music as she is also the leader of the band “Antony and the Johnsons”. The musician Antony Hegarty and the fine artist Anohni are one and the same person. To truly grasp these two souls, one need only look as far as their album covers which seem to announce her change of identity. An appraisal

by Friedrich Meschede.

Antony Hegarty’s first studio album was released in 2000 which introduced the name of the band: “Antony and the Johnsons”. In choosing this name, Hegarty paid tribute to the Afro-American drag queen Marsha P. Johnson, born in 1945 in Elizabeth, New Jersey as Malcolm Michaels, Jr. She was one of the leading activists of the transgender movement in New York and co-founder of the “Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries” (STAR), devoted to providing food and clothing to socially outcast drag queens, transvestites, prostitutes and homeless children. STAR is a self-organised, volunteer-based movement with headquarters in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where the famous Christopher Street is located and where, in front of the “Stonewall” bar, the so-called “Stonewall Uprising” erupted on 28 June 1969 in protest of police raids against ­racial and sexual minorities.

Marsha P. Johnson gave an extensive interview about her life just two days before her mysterious death when her body was found in the Hudson River on 9 June 1992. The interview serves as the basis for the documentary “Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson” by Michael Kasino and Richard Morrison. In interviews with those who knew her, Marsha P. Johnson is repeatedly described as having an almost “holy, charismatic personality”, a character trait we encounter again in a similar form in Kazuo Ohno. Indeed, it is fair to say that Marsha P. Johnson’s selfless devotion to social issues is so highly regarded that her name “Johnson” has become widely synonymous with social commitment in the scene. The song “River of Sorrow” by Antony Hegarty from 1998 mourns her death at the age of 46 and serves as the foundation for the programmatic name of the band. In a trilogy of studio albums by “Antony and the Johnsons” released in the years that followed, one can gradually recognise key aspects of the exhibition’s title “My Truth”.

I Am a Bird Now, 2005 The prize-winning album “I Am a Bird Now” was released in February 2005. The album cover features a photo

by Peter Hujar: “Candy Darling on her Deathbed” dated 1974. Candy Darling, born in 1944 in Forest Hill, New York as James Lawrence Slattery, was an avowed transgender actress and had performed in movies by Andy Warhol and Werner Schroeter (1945–2010), among others. She died at the young age of 29 on 21 March 1974. The photo

by Peter Hujar with flowers at her bedside, sent by Andy Warhol, became one of Hujar’s best-known photos.

The Crying Light, 2009 January 2009 saw the release of “The Crying Light” with a photo of Naoya Ikegani on the cover. It depicts the Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno in 1977, playing the role of “La Argentina”. Kazuo Ohno, born in 1906, is regarded as one of the co-founders of Japanese butoh dance theatre. His art strongly influences that of Anohni’s and her form of concert staging. For his part, Kazuo Ohno was deeply inspired by the Argentinean dancer Antonia Mercé y Luque, born in 1890 in Buenos Aires, died in 1936 in Paris, whose dance stage name was “La Argentina”. For

Anohni, the photo of Kazuo Ohno as “La Argentina” represents a logical link in a thematic chain, evident in the white-painted face, for example, as Ohno appeared in butoh performances and which Anohni herself adopted for the first album cover.

Swanlights, 2010 For the cover of the following album “Swanlights”, released in October 2010, Anohni presented a self-­ made collage – indicating new self-confidence in her own pictorial world. It depicts a dying polar bear named ­“Swanlights”.

The exhibition title “My Truth” is rooted in the trilogy of album covers described above and reveals a key motif in Anohni’s artistic work as both a musician and fine artist: sickness and death, and by extension, the loss of friends and companions in the New York art scene, for whom she moved to the city in 1990. There she co-founded the performance cult group “Blacklips” together with Johanna Constantina as an artists’ collective, which became part of the New York subculture. In the chronology of performances since 1992, the name Antony Hegarty started to appear more frequently in various pieces. After receiving a scholarship from New York University, the group succeeded in staging its first large-scale production in 1996, “The Birth of Anne Frank / The Ascension of Marsha P. Johnson”, a play which debuted in 1997 at the famous avant-garde performance centre “The Kitchen” and ultimately led to the formation of the band. “The Kitchen”, founded in 1971 as a non-commercial performance, video art and new music venue, was in fact originally located in the kitchen of the Mercer Art Center in Greenwich Village.

After changing locations to Soho in 1974, the art centre relocated to Chelsea in 1985, where it still operates today.

The debut of Anohni’s performance piece led to a meeting with James Elaine, who later became a curator at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, which staged the first solo exhibition of Anohni’s works of fine art in 2012.

Anohni’s artistic technique is based on objects she finds and combines with papers or other materials to form collages and assemblages. Occasionally she is inspired to use photos, texts and images if some personal connection to the respective object exists. Personal experiences or social issues she feels strongly about, like fighting climate change, which is a theme in “Swanlights”, become more prominent in these works. The themes addressed in her artistic works run parallel to those she pursues in her musical endeavours. For example, last autumn she released the single “4 Degrees” on the opening day of the world climate change conference in Paris which be­ came the unofficial hymn of the summit. In other relatively unknown works, she uses overpainting and incorporates extracts and wax into paintings and sculptures as stylistic devices of a personally encoded pictorial language – one that signifies more than personal injuries, but can be interpreted as metaphors for a responsible, political view of our world.

Friedrich Meschede is the director of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld.

39 Three Poems

by Sirka Elspaß

auf einer toilette in versailles bekomme ich meine tage begutachte das und sage in richtung unterkörper no one belongs here more than you / bloom wherever you're planted ich tropfe

das fleisch hat mich angefasst ich sehe im spiegelsaal

zu wie alles passiert reliquien der marie a. könnten sein verbrannte haare in der bürste o. ä. – ich föhne mir meine wimpern

als käme ich frisch aus dem krieg

versailles, zweiter teil das herz? ein schlachtabfall habe ich gelesen

und der gedanke nie an der fleischertheke zu stranden

gefiel mir sehr dort wo die schweine ihre beine ablegen neben die begrasten zungen des vieh gehört strom nicht mehr hin

ich habe ihn an einer anderen stelle ausgezogen wilde tiere werden ihn ausbuddeln und nicht zimperlich sein

aus der luft betrachtet sieht der garten von versailles aus wie ein integrierter schaltkreis ein mikrochip

manchmal sind sachen am leben für die ich nichts kann

zum beispiel ein mädchen das sich mit wimperntusche einen hitlerbart malt es gibt einen abfall für körperteile

zum beispiel wenn du deine hände nicht mehr haben willst manchmal passiert das

vielleicht hast du zu viele menschen angefasst dann kannst du sie loswerden unten im biomüll dort wo sich der holunder neigt

meine zehen sehen aus wie E.T.s finger

nach hause telefonieren ging damit noch nie

das bedeutet auf dem heimweg klatschen nicht mal die brennnesseln mit mir ab

The first international “babelspeak” conference for young German-speaking poets was held in Lana (southern Tyrol) in 2013. It was organised by the Literaturwerkstatt / Haus für Poesie and was funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. The conference has become a catalyst of sorts for other projects and meetings which have contributed to further expanding the cross-border poetry network. www.babelsprech. org, a babelspeak “baby website” which quickly outgrew its parental home page, offers information on this extraordinary alliance of poets, their ideas, activities and latest works. The project gained further public attention with the release of the volume Lyrik von Jetzt 3 [Poetry of Now 3], published in December 2015 and featuring a selection of poems by babelspeak authors. In the following, we present several poems by two very promising women poets, both of whom will celebrate their 21st birthday in 2016: Christiane Heidrich and Sirka Elspaß.

These poems are so fresh that they have not yet been translated into English. Nonetheless, we wish to present them here in their original language.

Sirka Elspaß, born in 1995 in Oberhausen, studies Creative Writing and Cultural Journalism in Hildesheim.

She also lives and works there. ­www.fred-erika.de Christiane Heidrich, born in 1995 in Karlsruhe, now lives in Vienna. She studied the Fine Arts in Stuttgart and Creative Writing in Vienna.

(Her poems can be found on p. 45.)

40

DA NC E R S instead of SOLDIERS o r­ GESTURES­ a g a i n s t F E A R Boris Charmatz on new spaces of experience for dance

41 M

Margarita Tsomou: It is the beginning of 2016 and as we speak you are in a studio in Brussels working on your next piece. What are you preparing?

B

Boris Charmatz: I am working on “danse de nuit”, a piece for six dancers in urban spaces by night. In the process of looking for the right space for Musée de la danse in Rennes, we thought that the best architecture could be to have none – not walls, but the moving city would be our architecture.

So we conducted research, also with reference to the problem of public space in Europe. Consider that we have many more armed soldiers than dancers in our squares and train stations. I don’t mean to naively replace them, but would like to point out how the streets have increasingly become spaces of fear of the “other”, a s well as privatised and segregated.

M

Where do you plan to perform and how? From the Situationists to Trisha Brown, the challenge of public space has always been how to intervene in and recodify contexts that are loaded with meaning by the social practices enacted in them ...

B

I was thinking about Place de la République in Paris that has been a space for gatherings against Jean-Marie Le Pen and inhabits different practices, like demonstrations, an open-air school for refugees or mourning for the victims of Charlie Hebdo and the November 2015 attacks. But maybe we need a socially less loaded space ... One is never blindfolded; spaces influence us, but we also partly change them by dancing in them. What I like about dance is that its articulation has multiple significations and resonances and thus its interventions can be more fragile, dance can even submerge in specific spaces – in these moments I like to be a dancer.

M

You will be part of the upcoming Dance Congress 2016 in Hannover. How do you plan to intervene in this context?

B

The concrete idea is still under construction. Recently I started something that – for lack of a better name – I call “transformative choreographies” or “protocols” – a kind of method of bringing projects together. Not as a line-up of pieces, but as the creation of an interconnected set, where the space and the people participating go through different stages and change through time.

We start with a collective warm-up. You can watch, but you can also take part and become a performer.

Then the audience will enter the congress venue, the opera house in Hannover, and visit the live exhibition of “20 dancers for the XX century”. This is an exhibition of solo gestures of the 20th century that we’ve already shown in many places, including Berlin. And as a third step, we will all gather on the opera stage for the dance piece “manger”. Here the audience members will be in the middle of the performance action on stage, while the performers are eating, moving and singing among them.

M

You show three projects, but you claim that it’s not a simple line-up. The act of bringing them toge­ ther sounds characteristic for your work to me: you experiment with various mediatic logics, combine distinct spaces and thus challenge given modes of producing and perceiving art.

B

Yes, the idea is to create a structure where one will move through three projects, three spaces and three experiences, as if they were connected to each other. What I like is that the public changes positions from 1) participating in a warm-up, where you almost perform yourself, to 2) visiting an exhibition, where one is free to walk without instructions and constraints, to 3) watching an art piece like “manger”, immersed on a horizontal level to the performers.

M

You constantly move the audience around which makes me think of the manifesto of Musée de la danse, where you said you wanted to “transform or rethink the relationship between the audience and its physical and imaginative territories” ...

B

When Sandra Neuveut, Martina Hochmuth and I started Musée de la danse, we thought that the spaces for dance are too split. Firstly, you have the dance class, where dance is something you do.

Then dance is taking place on stage, here it is something you look at. But dance enables a much wider range of modes of experiences – it can evoke discussions and texts, it can be watched on video, experienced on the Internet. With Musée de la danse we wanted to open a door to create a new space for experiencing dance. We try to thin down the walls between amateurs and professionals, pedagogy and art, research and improvisation. How this attitude is being actualised each time we cannot say, it depends on the project and the participants.

We like the shift of postures from participating in a dance class, to being a visitor, from being a passerby, to being a real dancer. What we are doing now at the Dance Congress is connected to that line of thought.

M

So you apply the logics of Musée de la danse to Hannover through these three projects, which in combination enlarge the way dance is produced and experienced. Still the question remains how you present pieces that were made for other contexts.

“Manger” is an easier case since it takes place in a black box, but how do you proceed with “20 dan­ cers for the XX century”?

B

We always start with a protocol or – to say it differently – a structure: these are 20 dancers who we choose specifically for each context. There is no technical equipment, no lighting, no costumes, maybe a little music box. They develop their solos and all together it creates an exhibition or a ‘forest’ of dancers and gestures. But this structure does not say what you will have in the performance at the end. Some parts are fixed, some more ephemeral, some we adapt. For example, in Berlin we placed the performance at a historical graveyard of Russian soldiers who fell in World War II, a space marked with a complexity of social practices. We invited German artists like Reinhild Hoffmann, who proposed a text by Heiner Müller, but also organised a Karl Marx lesson by Dmitry Gutov. So we open up, we follow the performers but also give some directions ourselves.

For Hannover, we’re still in development. We are looking for artists from the city, such as Kurt Schwitters, whom I adore, and studying the dance history of the city. We would also like to address the history of the Dance Congress itself which was founded in the 1920s and was re-established recently. Of course we also want to refer to the space itself which is an opera house.

M

I read “20 dancers for XX history” as a suggestion for a method to historicise dance movement. For me, it is no coincidence that you are an associated artist for this year’s Dance Congress which aims to explore the term “contemporaneity” – a term that one associates with historicity and time. What is your take on the term?

B

How would you define it?

M

I can try. First of all, it is regarded as a dimension of temporality, meaning what is considered as the “new”, the “current”, taking place in the “now”. But who decides what is “new” in the “now”? There are specific things that are regarded as “contemporary” today. We say “contemporary dance” and mean something different than “modern dance”. Thus one could also consider “contemporaneity” as re-

42

B

ferring to certain genres of art. Historically they might have taken place in very different times – from the 1960s to today – but they all apply a “contemporary style” mostly bound to aesthetic methods like concept-based art, site-specificity, de-materialisation, participation, the post-dramatic etc. Here contemporaneity would be a genre and less a category of time.

M

I read your work of creating spaces as a proposition for new institutions – Musée de la danse produces multiple institutional modes of experiencing dance. What are the challenges concerning the institutional act you are assigned to produce at the Volksbühne in Berlin? How can we think of a contemporary institutional practice for a space like the Volksbühne?

Yes, and a third way would be to think of it as a space.

A horizontal space of people who share history or genres and practices.

B

It is still very open. I can say that I love Berlin, I have always loved the Volksbühne and that I am not in charge of the house myself, but co-inventing structures or formats. Musée de la danse resulted in our increased interest in public spaces. But I still don’t know how Musée de la danse and the Volksbühne will be connected. What I know is that there is the idea that the Volksbühne will be a new kind of theatre, like the stage was the centre of the Bauhaus. The theatre becomes a place to think beyond itself. The Volksbühne is not a mere building anymore, but it is a north-south line that goes from Tempelhof to Neukölln, Mitte and Prater. It’s become more of an archipelago. For example, before Tempelhof was established as a space for refugees, I was planning to work there. My question is what kind of practices and protocols should be enacted at the Volksbühne. So that it is not only us, the curators, who will answer the question concerning the challenges of the Volksbühne, but the multitude of social, cultural and political contexts in Berlin, a city full of artists.

M So, let me think: could it be a space for producing contemporaneity, where a constant making-contemporary occurs through a process of “commoning”, or finding common ground through mutual engagement?

B

It is also a matter of my own position. I am not the one to say “20th century – this is it” or to define “contemporaneity”. As we do with projects like Musée de la danse, instead of giving an answer, we put a question mark and develop a platform, a horizontal realm, where artists and participants do something together in order to try to think about what is the “now”. Following each other might change how we look, touch, think about, for example, contemporaneity. But for that to happen, you have to open up the space to drift together. This horizontal attitude is inherent to the Dance Congress project. The warm-up takes place in the streets without a stage or infrastructure. Anybody passing by to go shopping, to go to work or to the cinema, becomes part of what we’re doing. Then, in “20 dancers” there is no clear position for the audience, one has the freedom to move and approach any dancer one chooses, talk to him after his solo. And in “manger” we turn the stage into a table, because we eat from the floor. A floor that we share with the visitors, asking: can we walk and eat from the same floor or table? So the Dance Congress project is also about the creation of these shared, horizontal spaces.

M

OK, if we think contemporaneity as something we do, as a horizontal space to produce communality, the question of the politics of invitation comes up.

Who is invited to “contemporaneity”, to spend time in common? Who decides which solo represents the 20th century? I wonder if bringing artists together makes you inevitably part of the production of a sort of “canon of the contemporaneous” in current dance history. Post-colonial critics, for example, would say that we Europeans universalise our practices as “contemporary dance” and consider other dance genres as backwards or traditional.

B

I am not interested in forming a canon at all. In “20 dancers” we avoid universal claims, the 20th century is created differently by the participants each time. And it is also about sharing the position of the curator. For example, Martina Hochmuth and I, as the curators of “expo zéro”, invite Faustin Linyekula, but we invite him to become a curator himself, he decides how to fill the space. I provide the frame, but at the same time the exhibition is created by ten participants who develop it. Concerning the post-colonial: since we started with Dimitri Chamblas many years ago, instead of “working with the ‘other’”, we invested in an archaeology of our own practices, trying to be conscious of the way we are constructed by specific dance techniques, for example. In the spaces we create, we open up in order to shift our horizons.

Though it is not about melting into one harmonious body, but about negotiating differences, pointing out the specificities why “Faustin is not Boris” and using the tension between the individual and the collective.

Margarita Tsomou is the co-editor of Missy Magazine. She was born in Greece and now works in Berlin as a writer, dramaturge and curator.

Dance Congress 2016 The Federal Cultural Foundation supports the Dance Congress as one of Germany’s cultural institutions of excellence. The event has been staged three times in the last ten years and takes place at a different location in Germany every three years. The Dance Congress has gained increasing recognition in recent years as a popular festival, international exhibition, interdisciplinary re­ search site, a competition for new ideas and a marketplace for co-productions. The next edition will take place in Hannover from 16 to 19 June 2016. Musée de la danse will open the congress with the piece “20 ­Dancers for the XX Century”, in which the renowned choreographer Boris Charmatz will explore the Dance Congress theme “Contemporaneity”. ↗ www.tanzkongress.de

43

C U LT I VATING a c o n science i n RU R A L S PAC E On Rural Life and Landscapes

by Kenneth Anders In Ehm Welk’s novel “The Heathens of Kummerow”, the children of a Western-Pomeranian village become entangled in a disturbing conflict. In a scene in front of an inn, a miller beats his horse to the point of unconsciousness. The children witness this act of cruelty. They wait for the on-looking adults to do something, but only the cowherd Krischan Klammbüdel, the lowest and least in the village hierarchy, dares to stand up to the animal abuser. The children try to stay the miller’s arm and finally their fathers awake and put an end to the affair. But for the horse, it’s too late. Some claimed the sorrel opened his eyes one last time and looked at the miller, then at Krischan, and the way he gazed at Krischan was very different. Human-like.

Because of this incident, the cowherd is cast out of the village, a victim of adult cowardice and administrative intrigue. The children, stunned by the injustice of it all, watch as he departs, his path from the village disappearing in the fog.

This story contains two paths which take us back to historical rural life: the use of nature (here in the form of a horse) and the personal experience of social inequality.

The horse is a farm animal; there’s no question about the legitimacy of its use. Anyone who earns their living from the water and soil, from animal and plant, knows that we humans appropriate nature. There is no way around it. We are heterotrophic; we live by subjugating, manipulating and destroying the life of others.

This circumstance is generally acknowledged in agrarian culture. This is why environmental protection has never had it easy in the rural areas. Well-known figures who support very specific measures to protect the local region, the trees, the lakes or birds, might find an open ear, but one certainly won’t find peopling queueing at the NABU* info stand in front of the village supermarket.

Based on the experience of the agricultural and forestry industries, protecting nature from human use is rather a form of bigotry.

Utilising nature is not an unregulated activity. It has its own principles and these are painfully obvious in the story of the killed horse. There are good and bad livestock owners, and the standards regulating them vary according to the rural culture. He or she who upholds the rules for dealing with nature can definitely be a proud user – but even a proud user is familiar with the feeling of regret. One takes joy in seeing beautiful, healthy animals thrive. One cares for them, feeds them and knows that some of them will be slaughtered in the winter. One is aware of one’s responsibility for this killing which must be carried out and personally endured every year with new selection decisions. This forces us to confront an unsolvable contradiction which can only be borne with the greatest need and sorrow, for we too share something with these creatures we use: the fact of mortality. Whatever the case may be, there is no position of innocence when it comes to our relationship to nature. It is this aspect which resonates in the line “forgive us our sins” in the Lord’s Prayer.

The second aspect refers to the social dimension of the incident in Kummerow, namely the display of social inequality. Like the appropriation of nature, this too is a distinctive trait of human existence which echoes in the petition “forgive us our sins” in the Lord’s Prayer.

In the historical, rural world, social inequality was first and foremost a personal challenge – and only at a higher level did it become an issue of political criticism and public welfare. By rural we mean villages and small towns since both types of settlement are too small to spatially segregate social inequality and entrust the responsibility for alleviating the disparity to an institution. The poor and wealthy live as next-door neighbours. They often attend the same school and come in direct contact with one another in working relationships. There’s at least one extremely underprivileged person in every real village,

44 and personal experience seems to confirm that there is usually good reason for why their social status is so low. Of course, we could analyse the reasons for their behaviour, but through constant interaction – and also the repeat patterns of social inequality – this question appears academic.

Here, too, the actual acknowledgment of a dilemma does not mean there are no applicable rules. To the contrary, underprivileged rural inhabitants have a right to participate in the community, though one may find some of their qualities strange or disruptive. Their odour or drinking habits don’t legitimise their absolute exclusion. Treating these people with decency, especially where others fail to do so, forges a pronounced awareness and ability to deal practically with social inequality.

Yet something always remains unresolved. Despite the sovereignty we’ve gained in this matter, social disparity draws a fine line between the interpersonal relationships among unequals. There is never a doubt to which group one belongs. The authenticity of the privileged individuals is always measured by the fact that they do not lower themselves to the level of the others.

Stories like that of the killed horse and banished cowherd are created in places where people live in relatively small communities and personally cultivate the natural resources, or in other words, where they lead sedentary lives in an elementary, subsistence-based economy. These forms of sedentary life have been eroding away for centuries; more and more people are living in conurbations where their subsistence is guaranteed by supply networks. This is often the result of the violent destruction of subsistent forms of living due to war, energy production and land-grabbing. Yet one should not underestimate the draw of the big city which persists in the country and drives rural exodus. It derives from psychological duress.

The appropriation of nature and social inequality challenge rural dwellers to form their own judgements and lead their lives accordingly; they cultivate the ability to act unconventionally. But the rules by which human practice is judged nevertheless remain a corset which the individual is powerless to loosen. Space itself, the relationship of house, village and landscape can become a prison. Those who suffer from the natural-social dilemma of the country cannot achieve freedom by implementing change on location, but only by changing locations – in other words, literally “skipping the country”.

At one time in history, rural exodus was synonymous with emancipation.

With the loss of spatial ties, feelings of individual guilt as mentioned above are no longer a given. Land usage becomes a systemic function of faraway places; the treatment of the poor becomes institutionalised.

The appropriation of nature and production of misery are globalised, and one’s personal burden becomes a matter of universal guilt. For many people, humanity on the whole appears to be moving in the wrong direction, or alternatively, others are to blame for what’s going wrong in the world.

Consequently, young people today in modern cities are faced with a different dilemma than that facing the children in the village of Kummerow. They are hardly able to draw on personal experience to judge whether their parents’ behaviour deserves respect and admiration or reproach as a moral failure. The realisation that their entire lifestyle is inextricably linked to industrialised animal processing and terrible famines is shocking to many young people and gives rise to a desire for a generally untainted practice, for a radical withdrawal from the contradictions of life. Responsible consumption and, above all, the right type of diet have gained enormous significance. Establishing new wildlife reserves amounts to the selling of indulgences for society’s consumption of nature. The emancipatory impulse, which arises when people perceive social inequality, frequently becomes an attitude that regards inequality itself as a scandal.

Though the desire for innocence may be great, it is quite difficult to use it productively for our personal development or to shape our living conditions.

What becomes of the country when viewed from the perspective of the city? It becomes a landscape, a visual space, which one can paint, photograph, travel through and take delight in. Its functionality recedes, the usage of the land is regarded as disruptive, especially when it corresponds to the current state of technology in society. The idea that people still live “out there” seems like a relic from the olden days, especially in view of the fact that the concentration of opportunities and available choices in the country – compared to those in large cities – are ridiculously limited. The landscape is nice, but meaningless. If it’s ugly, we reject it even though it is part of our reality. And thus arise both well-loved and reviled spaces. The differentiation of landscapes based on their purpose leads to ever increasing segregation.

Tourism blossoms in one place, the agricultural industry flourishes in another, environmental protection here, logistics there. On an individual level, we have no sense of the harm we do in the world. This poses a difficult challenge for democracy, for the cultural subject needs to experience space in order to truly understand it. Yet the opportunity to have such an experience in a basically free and individual, albeit regulated manner is undermined by fences and property lines. The free life we so desire is squeezed into parcels or diffused in the virtual sphere.

ther vanish in the fog nor be brushed aside with flimsy promises of consumption. The landscape can enable us to do both: to shape our world, and thereby experience freedom, and to recognise all that we are and do. That would be a start. * Translator's note: NABU (Naturschutzbund Deutschland) is Germany’s largest nonprofit environmental protection organisation.

Kenneth Anders, born in 1968 in Naumburg, is a cultural studies scholar and lives in the Oderbruch region.

In collaboration with several partners, he operates the Office for Landscape Communication and the Aufland-­ Verlag publishing house. In connection with the TRAFO programme, he is developing a concept to redesign the Museum Altranft as a “workshop for rural culture”.

There is, however, a major advantage to having the country reinterpreted as landscape by urban society. It lays out before our eyes the entire space as an open world waiting to be shaped, through which its use, order and aesthetics become communicable and thus changeable.

We can enter the landscape without paying admission, we’re allowed to move freely in it without being held accountable to anyone, we can ask questions and demand answers. This civil right is anchored in society all the way down to our forestry laws. Not only does the cross-country movement guarantee the basic liberties of each individual, but it ensures the public control of space and its usage. It is worth standing up for; in fact, it’s worth roaming the world on foot for.

Here lies the chance to achieve an adequate relationship to space that corresponds to our actual relationship to nature. If we learn to regard landscape as the consequence of our appropriation of nature and as the physical structure of our social circumstances, then we will be able to bring our experience back in line with our behaviour. We realise how the life we lead makes its mark in the landscape. What was once guilt becomes responsibility for a cultural practice, from which there may well be no escape. However, it is no prison either, but a chance for a successful life in a shared and intellectually appropriated space. To make this tangible, we must learn to understand the landscape better.

I admit, interpreting landscape in such a way can leave one feeling immensely disquieted. There is no playing down the heterotrophic violence of the human acquisition of nature, it is complete, the losses are staggering. That is why we are so fortunate to have people in our society who cultivate their own resources in the country – country folk in the historical sense. There are fewer of them now, but that makes what they have to say all the more interesting. They are the standard-bearers of a new rural culture, into which the experience of rural sedentariness and that of modern freedom have been integrated for years – an integration of two very different lifestyles which has gone largely unnoticed. These people can help us understand and describe the universal relationship between individual life, social acquisition of nature and personal social behaviour in the landscape.

At present we cannot say whether the result would be a society in which the individual has the ability to fully participate in that society, as the Marxist aesthete Lothar Kühne once envisioned. But the violence and injustice suffered by the horse and cowherd should nei-

TRAFO Models for Culture in Transformation

With the programme “TRAFO – Models for Culture in Transformation”, the Federal Cultural Foundation is promoting the development and redefinition of cultural organisations in rural regions. Starting in four model regions, selected institutions are working together with local residents to develop concepts for transforming their cultural organisations. These will be implemented over the coming five years. Model projects in the Oderbruch region, southern Lower Saxony, in parts of the Saarpfalz and the Swabian Alb aim to provide perspectives on future-oriented concepts of usage. The main focus is not to save as many of these organisations as­ ­possible, but rather examine what alternative ­roles they could play: Who do they want to ­reach? What would an attractive cultural ­infrastructure in the region look like in the future? How could things be organised differently? The “TRAFO Academy” and an international “idea congress” will share the experience gained by the model regions and encourage further discussion and debate.

The Federal Cultural Foundation has allocated a total of 13.5 million euros to finance the programme for the next five years.

45 Four Poems

by Christiane Heidrich

Ein Pool, eine Lässigkeit. Von hier aus überall auftauchen können.

Jede Datei ist an sich schon genial. Herrlich allein mit dem eigenen Wissen.

Dass es Vögel gab anfangs, eine Gischt, die sich aussprechen ließe.

Noch einmal vor 10 Jahren schwimmen. Ein Abend in Schuhgröße 28.

Das zu sagen, ist zu nah an der Welt. Diverse globale Moves.

Wie wir Angst haben. Wie wir abgehen.

Ich beging zu viele Ideen.

Ein See ist pathetisch, wenn das Meer gar nicht fern liegt.

0,0283. Fantastische Winzigkeit, sodass es fast wieder ins Große geht.

Eine Party am Strand. Gebrechlichkeit als etwas Behutsames feiern.

Unter gesprächigen Palmen Bedeutung verschieben auf Morgen.

Handlung. Thumbnails. Schöner Zufall.

Außer zum Schlafen nirgendwo aufliegen.

Jugend auf Wiesen heißt Jugend auf austauschbarem Gebiet.

Fläche heißt also auch See. So entsprechen wir uns auf Tankern, deren Ladung sich erst unterwegs definiert.

Müd ist mein Tweet. Raum anzureichern. Leere. Hawaii.

Der Wecker geht hoffentlich früher an als die hilflose Seite der Bilder.

Kopfsache. Lycra. Dass es kalt ist, wissen wir nicht.

Aber irgendwo hier liegt eine Schule mit freundlichen, hellblauen Sälen.

Es gibt Texte darüber, Geschrei. Am Boden des Pools ähneln sich unsere Knochen.

Ich sehe Kontakt als Berührung. Ich sehe die Anstrengung wirklicher Bilder.

Schwimmen als allererste Idee. Vom Denken kommend ans Meer zu fahren.

Und Wind wäre völlig in Ordnung. Auch zu sagen: Faserland © 1995.

46

New P R O J E C T S Freeplay 2016 – still A music/dance performance

The main event of Freeplay 2016 is the violin concert “Still” by the contemporary British composer Rebecca Saunders. The performance is being developed by Saunders herself together with the violinist Carolin Widmann, dancers from the company Sasha Waltz & Guests and musicians from the Young German Philharmonic Orchestra. Saunders is composing new sections which invite the artists to interact within the existing composition. Soloists in the orchestra become dancers, while the dancers study the musicians’ movements and interpret them.

The presentation of two more works will offer unconventional approaches to the music, for example, by reversing the perspective of the listeners and placing them in the limelight. The “Lulu Suite”, written in 1934 by the Austrian composer Alban Berg, will be performed first.

The Suite will introduce the audience to Berg’s tonal language which consists of the combined influences of Schönberg’s atonality, twelve-tone composition and late Romanticism. The concert will conclude with the prelude to “Tristan and Isolde” by Richard Wagner.

The “Freeplay” concert format was created by the musicians of the Young German Philharmonic Orchestra. It offers composers a carte blanche for developing unconventional ideas and testing experimental performances practices.

Freeplay 2016 will premiere during the Kunstfest Weimar followed by a later performance at Radialsystem V in Berlin.

Musical director: Sylvain Cambreling (FR) Composer: Rebecca Saunders (GB) Soloists: Carolin Widmann, Ana Durlovski (MK) Stage design: Jochen Sandig Companies / ensembles / ­orchestras: Sasha Waltz & Guests, Young German Philharmonic Orchestra Radialsystem V, Berlin: 16–17 Aug. 2016; Weimarhalle, Weimar: 19–20 Aug. 2016 ↗ www.jdph.de

Bang on a Can @ Villa Musica Ten concerts of American music

Since they began in New York almost thirty years ago, the “Bang on a Can AllStars” have become one of the world’s most renowned groups in the area of contemporary music. They are known for masterfully walking the line between classic and jazz, rock, world and experimental music. In fact, they are credited

with creating their own genre based on their dynamic live performances and numerous self-composed works in their specific style. The group has collaborated with numerous artists, including Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, Don Byron, Ornette Coleman, the Sonic Youth musicians Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo.

For their upcoming project “Bang on a Can @ Villa Musica”, the All-Stars will be cooperating with the Stiftung Villa Musica, which is dedicated to promoting young talent especially in the area of chamber music. As part of a one-week festival, the New York-based ensemble will perform together with a group of young classical musicians and soloists from Germany. All of the musicians will perform together in twelve concerts in various arrangements at the Frankfurter Hof in Mainz and the Baroque Castle Engers in Neuwied. The festival also includes two commissioned works and will conclude with a several-hour-long concert marathon.

Artistic director: Alexander Hülshoff Musicians: Ashley Bathgate (US), Robert Black (US), Vicky Chow (US), David Cossin (US), Mark Stewart (US), Ken Thomson (US), Kai Schumacher, Jonathan Shapiro, Nora Krahl Composer: Michael Gordon (US) Frankfurter Hof, Mainz: 20 and 26 Nov. 2016; Schloss Engers, Neuwied: 21–25 Nov. 2016 ↗ www.villamusica.de

Happy Hunting Ground A Thai-German theatre-dance performance about dreams, ­prejudices and concepts of love

The dance theatre production “Happy Hunting Ground” examines the prejudices and stereotypes of sex tourism and investigates relationships whose origin and condition result from an enormous intercultural imbalance of power and affluence. At the same time, it explores love and romantic feelings under the constraints of a capitalist logic which turns everything into sellable goods.

What are the dreams of young women in Thailand who decide to enter a relationship with a foreigner? Why do Western men find the combination of paid love and affection so appealing? This production is the result of researched material and interviews conducted with men and women in Germany and Thailand. The focus, however, lies on the voices and perspectives of the Thai women who “work with foreigners”. The theatre director, choreographer and dancer Thanapol Virulhakul will stage the play with German and Thai dancers and actors on

the basis of the research. Virulhakul’s work is known far beyond Thailand’s borders. His theatre, the Democracy Theatre Studio in Bangkok, is regarded as one of the most cutting-edge contemporary theatres in Thailand. The world premiere will be held in Bangkok, and the German premiere will take place in Karlsruhe. Guest performances are planned in Thailand, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Supervising artistic director: Jan Linders Stage director & choreographer: Thanapol ­Virulhakul (TH) Author: Jürgen Berger Dramaturgy: Sarah Israel Actors & dancers: Jarunun Phantachat (TH), ­Sawanee Utoomma (TH), Vidura ­Amranand (TH) u. a.

Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok: 2–4 Sep. 2016; Bulapa University, ­Chonburi: 6–8 Sep. 2016; Badisches Staatstheater, Karlsruhe: end of ­September 2016; Theater Bern und Theater Graz: September –November 2016 ↗ www.staatstheater.karlsruhe.de

Projeto Brasil Performances, concerts, ­residencies, exhibitions

Brazil is one of the most important emerging countries in the world, boasts the strongest economy in South America and is one of the largest suppliers of raw materials on earth. The upcoming Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro will draw the world’s attention to Brazil once more in 2016. In the metropolitan cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, artists, creative thinkers, activists, intellectuals and NGO representatives have teamed up to demonstrate cultural and artistic resistance against an image of their country which is shaped all too often by tourism marketing. This project aims to significantly raise the public’s attention to these recent trends.

Five of the most influential production venues for contemporary performing arts in Germany have formed an alliance of their own in order to carry out this major project, which is unique in its dimension and promises to generate enormous synergetic effects. This collaboration will enable the partners to produce co-productions which would exceed the capacity of any individual theatre. In this way, the partners hope to develop the most comprehensive and multifaceted image of Brazilian metropolitan culture – free of touristic clichés. The project aims to present the diversity of alternative artistic proposals and forms of protest and creative civic involvement in

exhibitions, co-produced world and national premieres, concerts, interdisciplinary projects, workshops, activist LABs and public discussions.

The alliance is also planning to establish artist-in-residence programmes for Brazilian artists in Germany and German artists in Brazil. In keeping with the aim of promoting intensive cultural exchange, the works will not only be presented at the five German institutions in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Frankfurt/M. and Hamburg, but also in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador de Bahia.

Curators: Paula Borghi (BR), Suely Rolnik (BR), Ricardo Muniz ­Fernandes (BR) Dance: Lia Rodrigues (BR), Eduardo Fukushima (BR), Marcelo Evelin (BR), Alice Ripoll (BR), Michelle Moura (BR), Cena 11 (BR), Christian Duarte (BR) Theatre: Leonardo M ­ oreira (BR), Christiane Jatahy (BR) Fine art: Daniel Lie (BR), ­Opavivará (BR), Paulo Nazareth (BR) Photography: Pedro Lobo & ­Severino Silva (BR) Music: Metá Metá HELLERAU, Dresden: 19 May–7 June 2016; HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; ­Tanzhaus NRW, Düsseldorf; Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt/Main; Kampnagel, Hamburg: May–June 2016 ↗ www.hellerau.org

Walls – Iphigenia in Exile Seoul-Berlin cooperation

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s drama “Iphigenia in Tauris” depicts the historic, religious and social determinacy of humans and their attempt to escape from it – surmounting obstacles within and outside themselves. “Walls – Iphigenia in Exile” is a contemporary version of the play with a German-Korean perspective. The new version is a continuation of several years of collaboration between German and Korean theatre artists, originally initiated by the Goethe-Institut. Four Korean directors and one German director will interpret one act each, while two playwrights from Germany and South Korea are responsible for writing and incorporating new texts into the play.

In Goethe’s classical drama, Iphigenia is exiled in the politically and ­geographically isolated Tauris. Using Goethe’s text as a basis, “Walls” examines the concept of new and old, imposed and self-determined boundaries.

Both industrial nations of South Korea and Germany have experienced division and walls. Despite their prosperity, there are tendencies in both countries to erect walls against immigrants. Who are we keeping out, and who are we im-

47 The premiere of the dance piece will take place in Berlin with additional performances planned in Belgium, Austria, Greece and France. The performances will be supplemented by a symposium in Berlin and Athens, an interview series with experts from various disciplines and a “making-of” film, documenting the rehearsal process.

Artistic director: Laurent Chétouane (FR) Dancers: Raphaëlle Delaunay (FR), Roberta Mosca (IT), Ioannis Mandafounis (GR), Mikael Marklund (SE), Tilman O’Donnell (US) Musicians: Mathias Susaas Halvorsen (NO), Tilman ­Kanitz, Grégoire Simon (FR) Set & light ­design: Jan Maertens (BE) HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin: 29 Oct.–14 Nov. 2015; additional ­venues: ­Vienna, ­Brussels, Hamburg, Paris, Poitiers, Athens and others ↗ www.laurentchetouane.com

Borderlines

Photograph: Simona Boccedi

Plays, performances and the culture of violence in Mexico

Hofesh Shechter: Barbarians prisoning? It also touches on ethical questions of inclination and obligation, and truth and deception. The play will be performed bilingually by a German-­ Korean ensemble and will premiere in Seoul. Afterwards, the play will be shown to German audiences as a repertory ­production at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.

Artistic directors: Sonja Anders, Jungung Yang (KR) Stage directors: Kon Yi (KR), Jungung Yang (KR), Kyungsung Lee (KR), ZinA Choi (KR), Tilmann Köhler Set design: Karoly Risz Author: Mario Salazar Dramaturgy: Ulrich Beck, Danbi Yi (KR) Production manager: HeeJin Lee (KR) Actors: Franziska Machens, Helmut Mooshammer, Kotti Yun (KR), Alexander Khuon and others SPAF Festival, Seoul: 14–16 Oct. 2016; Kammerspiele des Deutschen Theaters, Berlin: 23 Oct. 2016–30 Jun. 2017 ↗ www.deutschestheater.de

Dance and Theatre International festival in Freiburg

After many years with the same format, the Freiburg festival “Dance and Theatre” underwent a major overhaul in 2014. As part of the new concept, the E-Werk became the coordinator for collaborations between the Theater im Marienbad and the Theater Freiburg in order to present a cross-genre programme

in the future. The redesigned format will now expand the festival further in a variety of ways.

The festival will host productions at new venues in public and private organisations so as to anchor it more firmly in the city environment. A programme of top-notch international artists such as Hofesh Shechter, Sasha Waltz & Guests, Needcompany, Ultima Vez and Peeping Tom will provide points of emphasis and appeal to new segments of the public. An additional focus will comprise site-specific works by groups such as Rimini Protokoll and Zentrum für Politische Schönheit which examine the issue of a contemporary, cross-genre presentation of movement in dance, theatre and performance art. In a symposium, dance artists will develop goals and initial steps for implementing a Freiburg “Dance Plan” to strengthen the marginal role of dance. With this new package of measures, the organisers hope to make Freiburg, located in Germany’s south-westernmost corner, a vibrant place of encounter for the independent scene in the medium term and to participate in international artistic developments.

Programme: Wolfgang Graf, Sonja ­Karadza, Laila Koller, Josef Mackert Artists: Fabuleus (BE), G ­ intersdorfer/ Klaßen, Het Laagland (NL), Hillel Kogan (IL), Hofesh ­Shechter (GB), Koen Augustijnen ­tanzmainz, Needcompany (BE), Ultima Vez (BE), Sasha Waltz & Guests

E-Werk, Theater Freiburg, Theater im Marienbad, Freiburg: 28 Apr.–14 May 2016 ↗ www.ewerk-freiburg.de

Khaos An encounter with chaos for ­dancers and musicians, based on J.S. Bach’s “Chaconne”

How can we find a dance technique which frees the dancer from every form, from every momentary restriction and recognisable pattern? This question, which has played a role in several of Laurent Chétouane’s earlier productions, is now the focus of renewed intensity in his next dance project “Khaos”. For this piece, the choreographer will collaborate with five dancers and three musicians. The musical basis is J.S. Bach’s “Chaconne” and more specifically, the transitions between the variations. These segments are especially challenging in that the musicians must start and end the phrases at the same time. Thanks to a cleverly conceived acoustic concept and a specially installed loudspeaker system, instable spaces are created which present both the performers and audience with “musical chaos”.

Chétouane’s artistic experiment is rooted in the idea that chaos represents an inevitable “model for the future”, and that we will be forced to accept the instability and crisis it brings. The goal of the experiment would be to make chaos more fruitful so that it can be experienced by artists and viewers in a new and productive manner.

Starting in May 2016, Germany will be presenting a number of artistic projects in Mexico, and Mexico will be doing the same in Germany. As part of this bilateral collaboration, the “Borderlines” festival will be staged at the Münchner Kammerspiele with a focus on the performing arts. The Kammerspiele ­ has invited several independent Mexican theatre groups to perform their current productions, some of which will be ­European premieres. In addition to hosting guest performances by established groups, the festival wishes to especially support young directors and performers who are staging their very first productions. With its focus on Mexico, the ­festival spotlights a region which is characterised by a strong disparity of wealth between the north and south and where exodus and migration play a central role.

The highlight of the festival will be a production by the Mexican director Ángel Hernández which explores the themes of exodus and migration in a European context. In Mexico, his works are widely regarded as a new form of political the­ atre. Using the means and ends of art, he attempts to reclaim and revitalise spaces and venues which have been damaged or even destroyed by organised crime. With his featured intervention at the “Borderlines” festival, he continues many years of artistic work with labour migrants in freight trains, posing the question of how the situation along the borders of Europe is comparable to that along the borders of the United States.

Curators: Christoph Gurk, Matthias Lilienthal, Anne Schulz Artists: Ángel Hernández Arreola (MX), Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (MX), Gabino Rodriguez (MX), Marianna Villegas (MX), Pollyester and others Münchner Kammerspiele: Munich: 1–15 Nov. 2016 ↗ www.muenchner-kammerspiele.de

48

»It’s all about food.« ­Really?

A fact-finding mission for the theatre project “Human Trade Network” by director Clemens Bechtel Outside the building, a huge cow made out of bronze, inside a poster. A landscape, the mountain on it is a piece of meat. We are walking up some stairs, enter an empty room.

Leather chairs, a big semi-round table, three men enter. At the head of the table, the rather old manager sits down, quite a strange character in his 80s suit. Is he wearing a wig? Does he colour his hair? A character like from a Bollywood movie. Behind him a map of Germany, with little red flags at every place where his company has a branch, lots of them in the south-west of the country, none in the north, a few in the east. “In the east we slaughter for export,” he says, pointing at the map, “but not here in this area.” And: “In all, sixty million pigs are slaughtered each year in Germany. Eight million in the north, one million in Bavaria, and here the rest. Our company stands for high quality and for short transport.

We don’t supply supermarkets, where the cheap meat is sold, but butchers, hospitals … We produce high-class meat.” Whenever he makes a joke, the young guy next to him laughs, he is the company’s chemist. Later on he tells me that none of his friends like the job he’s doing.

“We in the slaughter business are the bad guys, and we always will be.”

In the early days, C. was a small company dealing with cattle; only 30 years ago they started with slaughtering. But in the last years they faced difficulties not only because of the competition in the north, but also because it was getting more and more difficult to find workers. “No young man in Germany wants to do this kind of work.” (Do Romanians like this work of ‘deboning’ or ‘cutting’? What would they choose?). Yet: “There will be always poor people in the world,” the manager says, “ready to do this kind of job.”

“The price pressure in this business is enormous,” he continues with his broad German accent, “and the big supermarkets are setting the prices. In the end they don’t make money with meat, they sell it cheaper than they buy it, they only profit from the non-food sector.

Our company can’t compete with the big slaughterhouses in northern Germany pricewise, but we are very close to our customers. If you need 600 schnitzel today, we can deliver them the same day.” Suddenly he receives an urgent phone call (600 schnitzel?), and leaves me in the company of the personnel manager. A man in his late fifties, glasses, conservative, not at all a manager type. He brought plans. He shows me the flats where their Romanian, Polish, Hungarian workers stay. Twenty-square-metre rooms for two people. “Some partners from Eastern Europe don’t understand why only two people share such a big room, they think this is a waste of space. All in all, there are only 30 people from abroad working for us,” he explains. Some of them stay longer, some shorter. Every week he receives several offers from companies from Eastern Europe who are ready to send him workers, but if the price is too low, he knows there must be something wrong. He even travelled to Poland to do research on his own. When he visited the addresses of some agencies dealing with workers, he only found letter boxes. He explains the difference between Leih­ arbeit (temporary work) and Werkvertrag (fixed contract).

Having a Werkvertrag with let’s say a Hungarian company means they place a fixed order, the Hungarians send their workers, who always stay together in a team and are not even allowed to be in a team with German workers.

The Hungarians finish what is agreed on and go home.

With Leiharbeit it is different; workers are sent for a specific time, they can work with Germans and have to get the same salary as their German colleagues, then they

pay a percentage of the wages to the temporary agency, as I understand it.

C. only works with qualified workers. Once they had people who knew nothing about slaughtering and couldn’t handle the job. They had to send them home after two days. In each branch they have different nationalities: in Emmendingen they work with Hungarians, and in Freiburg, with Romanians. He, like his colleague, eats meat, and still likes it.

When we’re about to leave, we receive gifts. A marketing film, cards, a memo cube with notepaper, a little box where you can store your steak with the company’s name written on it, some brochures explaining what C. is.

Inside are photos with red meat resembling landscapes …

Ms D. is a bit late. She was head of the police department for organised crime for ten years in Berlin.

She advises us to do some research in child trafficking, then she talks about her former job. When asked about clients who want to pay pimps for a prostitutes’ freedom, she laughs. “These clients are the worst. They expect to pay and to receive true love for their money. But what if the girls don’t feel happy in the end? What if the girl misses the contacts to her colleagues, her work? In the end, even her relationship to the pimps is often different from what you would expect. We look at him as someone exploiting her, threatening her with violence, selling her, she sees him as a friend, as a helper, as her personal travel agent.” Ms D. also talks about women working as pimps or assisting the big bosses. “Often these ladies are crueller than the men in the business. They know how to harm and threaten the girls, because they themselves were victims of trafficking some years ago.”

Ms D. does not like the ‘Alice Schwarzer approach’ (i.e. to forbid and ban prostitution) but confirms that with the new law and with the EU getting bigger, the ­situation has dramatically changed. The prices went down, girls don’t know how much they can charge for what. “Nowadays some clients expect to get a wedding night for thirty euros.” Or: "You won't see it, unless you believe it". In other words: If you don't see it, it doesn't exist.

Standing outside a slaughterhouse in a remote area of Lower Saxony, there’s a change in shifts. Lots of cars from Romania, Hungary and Poland at the car park, next to the trucks which read “It’s all about food”. Men and women, young ones but also middle-aged are leaving the huge complex with security cameras installed everywhere. They all carry a blue plastic basket containing tools or something similar. Some of them are also taking meat with them, packed in a white carton, perhaps for their barbecue in the evening. Some of these workers are transported in busses. They sit right in front of the entrance on the ground, waiting for transport.

Others head to their own cars with number plates from Timisoara or Maramures. Most of the men are wearing trainers, but there are a lot of women coming out of the huge complex in tight jeans and T-shirts. Gianina talks to a middle-aged lady from Sibiu. She started here a couple of weeks ago, says the working conditions are okay, she rooms with another woman, just the two of them. Is she really okay with her work? “Yes.” But there is something in her voice and in her eyes which says “No,” or “What choice do I have?” What choice does she have?

Again it’s about choice. The most striking image to me is that of a young couple leaving the slaughterhouse, holding hands and carrying their blue baskets in their other hands. They are walking hand-in-hand towards

their car, sort of a honeymoon in the slaughterhouse?

A couple of hours later. A former military complex, houses behind a wire fence. Green surroundings, next to the houses are wooden tables where people sit outside drinking Bergen Bier and eating Romanian food. Further away, many red containers, no windows, no walls, just these metal containers. A door is open, I see two beds. This is where the people stay who work in the fields to harvest the strawberries. Finally a supermarket where people buy Romanian goods, even the lady behind the cash register is Romanian. Opposite the building, the sanitary complex, showers, laundry and so on.

Somehow there’s a feeling of a camp site or one of those Russian holiday camps at the seaside. It is summer and everything looks so well organised, people seem content, everything seems to be okay. Besides us. We are strangers here who do not fit into this world of workers, people who hardly see anything of Germany except the slaughterhouse and this complex. A bit like the cattle, living on a farm and then brought to the butcher. A bus comes in, bringing more of them from the last shift.

This kind of work migration doesn’t disturb the German peace. The workers stay for a couple of months, then go home, happy to have earned some money. “Why can’t we bring the slaughterhouses to Romania instead of the workers here?” Ms Rein, a consultant from DGB in the area, asks and immediately provides the answer: “Too far away for the animals and besides, the officials are afraid of the health risks for the animals.” So the Romanians are transported to the slaughterhouse and perhaps many of them feel okay with it. They don’t have to integrate and Germany doesn’t have to integrate them.

Everything is alright as long as you function. But if a worker has an accident, if he doesn’t do what is expected, if he doesn’t manage to work fast enough, if he starts to talk about his workplace or dares to film it, he is in deep trouble. Once a year the camp site is open to visitors. Germans can enter the grounds and watch how the Romanians live who slaughter the pigs for them.

“Everything alright behind the wire fence,” a local news reporter titled his text.

People in the camp stare at us as we stare at them.

“What do you want here?” they seem to ask. Perhaps they think we are some activists, protesting against their work conditions. Perhaps we belong to those who want to change the system, to scandalise it. In the end they could lose their jobs, they could lose their all-inclusive German slaughterhouse stay, they could lose money.

“Leave us alone,” they seem to say without saying a word.

What happened to the slaves who wanted to stay slaves after the abolition of slavery in the 19th century? What kind of consequences did they face? Did they lose their jobs, their houses, did they starve? Is it worth paying that price for freedom? Who decides what is fair and what is free?

Clemens Bechtel, born in Heidelberg in 1964, studied Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Giessen, after which he worked as an assistant director at the TAT Frankfurt, the Nationaltheater Mannheim and the Schauspielhaus Hamburg, among other venues. He started his career as a freelance director in 1995 and has gained particular recognition for his documentary projects. He has staged productions in Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Romania, Denmark, Mali and Malawi.

49 Human Trade Network Transnational research network

Labour migration is one of the largest challenges facing societies in the 21st century. In global price wars, human beings are sold or at least traded at a profit. The project “Human Trade Network” addresses this topic in an international context and attempts to create a global theatre and temporary research network spanning three continents. Four theatres in India, Romania, Burkina Faso and Germany will be investigating the causes, structures and effects of human trafficking and the exploitation of labour. Each will develop an independent production which mutually references the others.

The partners will support each other with interviews and documentary material. The projects feature a broad range of themes and present stories that tie the four countries together. They tell the story of Romanian workers in Germany’s cost-efficient meat production facilities, Eastern European sex workers who travel from Bucharest to Breisgau, surrogate mothers, international adoptions and the market for talented football players.

The plays will be produced for audiences in the respective countries; guest performances at the partner theatres are planned. All four productions will be shown at a festival in Freiburg lasting several days and accompanied by a theatre congress, presentations and discussion series.

Artistic director: Clemens Bechtel Stage directors: Gianina Carbunariu (RO), I­ ldevert Meda & Luca Fusi (BF), Abhishek M ­ ajumdar (IN) Theater Freiburg: 24 Mar.–30 Jul. 2016; ­Teatrul Mic, Bukarest: ­15 Apr. ­ 2016–18 Apr. 2019 Theater ­Freiburg, Werkraum & Kleines Haus: 19–26 Feb. 2017 ↗ www.theater.freiburg.de

Asylum of the Tired European Special project of the Wiesbaden Biennale 2016

Europe is mired in constant crisis: a crisis of institutions and narratives, and now a crisis of identity. Who do we want to be, how do we want to live, who belongs to us? Those who wish to avoid feeling depressed about the current situation need a place to escape to – an open, creative space of transition between misgivings and new beginnings.

The Wiesbaden Biennale 2016 provides the “tired European” exactly that – asylum. Eight international artists are designing exemplary institutions and concepts of a utopian society. They will occupy central locations in the city and scrutinise various rituals and narratives.

For example, the Dutch performance artist Dries Verhoeven is developing ten funeral ceremonies at St. Augustine’s Church. Each day he will lay to rest certain ideas and long-held beliefs (welfare state, eternal fidelity) which society

should possibly bid farewell to. The Belgian director Thomas Bellinck will move into the vacant court building and create a museum of the future which looks back at Europe’s disintegration. The Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué plans to convert the Theaterstudio into a critical school of art which analyses the media machine of Islamic terror. The viewers and passers-by will be invited to become a part of the community and continue writing Europe’s narrative.

The Wiesbaden Biennale is the successor to the festival “New European Plays”. Founded in 1992 from a spirit of European awakening, the festival – 24 years later – aims to critically analyse European identity.

Artistic directors: Maria Magdalena Ludewig, Martin Hammer Artists: Dries Verhoeven (NL), Thomas Bellinck (BE), Rabih Mroué (LB), Tiago Rodrigues (PT), Georgia Sagri (GR), Ingo Niermann, Margarita Tsomou (GR/DE) and others Diverse venues, Wiesbaden: 25 Aug.–4 Sep. 2016 ↗ www.staatstheater-wiesbaden.de ↗ www.wiesbaden-biennale.de

LiteraTurm 2016 The Borderless Text

How can film editing influence literature? How can musical techniques be applied to literature? And what happens when text and dance collide? The biennial festival LiteraTurm 2016 will be based on the motto “The Borderless Text” which refers to the crossing of borders through the interweave and interaction between literature and other art forms. It also plays on the aesthetic blurring of boundaries which the written word makes possible: experiments with sounds, tones, digital media and poetry create entirely new hybrid forms. Wellknown writers, poets and musicians will venture into unexplored textual terrain in readings, concerts and discussions.

The transformation of literature into other forms of art is another central theme of the festival, for example, how ­literature is transformed into film and dance. For the first time, LiteraTurm will be cooperating with the Birmingham Literature Festival. Not only will both festivals focus on similar themes, but also exchange event formats, such as this year’s poetry film series. The events will be staged in Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Wiesbaden and other locations in the Rhine-­Main region.

Artistic director: Sonja Vandenrath Artists: Literature / Film: Oskar Roehler Literature / Drama / Radio plays: Frank Witzel, Armin Petras, Leonhard Koppelmann Literature / Dance: Martina Hefter, The James Cousins Company (GB) Performance: Ant Hampton and Tim Etchell (GB) Music / Literature: Ensemble Modern Lautpoesie: Michael Lentz, Jaap Blonk (NL), Nora Gomringer Literature / Fine Arts: Martin ­Mosebach Literature / Pop music:

Thomas M ­ einecke, Ulrich Peltzer, Stefan Twardoch (PL), Jakob Hein Diverse venues: Frankfurt, Darmstadt and the Rhine-Main Region: 1–11 Jun. 2016 ↗ www.kultur-frankfurt.de

Our Common Futures Plays and performances from Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok and Singapore at the Theaterformen Festival 2016 in Braunschweig

The Theaterformen festival is one of the largest international theatre festivals in Germany. The upcoming festival in June 2016 will host six artists from the East Asian metropolitan cities of Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok and Singapore. In their works, the artists make reference to a diverse range of aesthetic traditions, whereby their artistic approaches are among the most critical and progressive in their respective regions. Their common theme is the growing acceleration in media, economy, politics and technology. In recent years, Tokyo, Bangkok, Seoul and Singapore have undergone rapid development. Phenomena such as overpopulation, extreme ­weather conditions, networking and isolation now impact everyday life and demonstrate what the future in Europe might look like.

The festival organisers have invited the Japanese theatre artist Toko Nikaido whose works portray Japanese teenage culture as the battlefield of societal processes. The Singaporean artist Tzu Nyen Ho will present a stage installation titled “Ten Thousand Tigers”, a hallucinatory collection of miscellany about the Malay Peninsula, in which magic, complex technology, the mind and electricity combine. The festival will be accompanied by a conference, organised in cooperation with the University of Hildesheim and the FU Berlin, as well as several master classes, a film programme and a joint exhibition with the Kunstverein Braunschweig.

Artistic director: ­Martine Dennewald Artists: Ho Tzu Nyen (SG), Kyunsung Lee (KR), Creative VaQi (KR), Toko Nikaido / Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker (JP), Toshiki Okada / ­chelfitsch (JP), Minhee Park (KR), Thanapol Virulhakul / Democrazy Theatre (TH) u. a.

Staatstheater Braunschweig: 9–19 June 2016 ↗ www.theaterformen.de

Sisters in African Cinema Women filmmakers, the women’s movement and feminism in African cinema

In recent years, women from African countries have started numerous film projects, established production companies and casting agencies and organised film festivals – from the Ivory Coast to Nigeria and all the way to Zimbabwe.

In effect, they are doing exactly what the French film director and grande dame of African cinema Sarah Maldoror had in mind when she stated: “Women have to thematise their problems themselves.” More and more women from African countries and the African diaspora are standing in front of and behind the camera. Their films highlight the role of women as they fight against prevailing injustice and violence, demonstrate their commitment to politics, art and culture, and accompany women in their daily lives.

The film project “Sisters in African Cinema” wishes to introduce this artistic awakening to a broad audience in Germany. The project plans to create a film series in collaboration with female artists, such as Nadia El Fani, Dyana Gaye and Beti Ellerson, comprised of approximately 20 feature-length, documentary and short films to be shown for the first time at the Cologne festival “Beyond Europe XIV – New Films from Africa”. Following the premiere, the film series will go on tour through Germany.

In order to present the visions and perspectives of African women, the project will also initiate encounters and workshops with female filmmakers, theorists, actors and activists.

Artistic director: Christa Aretz Curatorial board: Beti Ellerson (US), Dyana Gaye (FR), Nadia El Fani (TN), Judy Nini Kibinge (KE), Djamila Sahraoui (DZ), Zevia Desai Keiper (ZA) Festival “Beyond Europe XIV – New Films from Africa”: Film forum at the Museum Ludwig, Filmhauskino, Zentralbibliothek, Cologne: 15–25 Sep. 2016 ↗ www.filme-aus-afrika.de

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The Website The Federal Cultural Foundation maintains an extensive, bilingual website where you can find detailed information about the Foundation’s activities, responsibilities, funded projects, ­programmes and much more. Visit us at: ↗ www.kulturstiftung-bund.de ↗ facebook.com/kulturstiftung ↗ twitter.com/kulturstiftung

Imprint Publisher Kulturstiftung des Bundes Franckeplatz 2 06110 Halle an der Saale T +49 (0)345 2997 0 F +49 (0)345 2997 333 info@kulturstiftung-bund.de ↗ www.kulturstiftung-bund.de Executive Board Hortensia Völckers, Alexander Farenholtz (responsible for the content) Editor-in-chief Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel Editorial advisor Tobias Asmuth Final editing Therese Teutsch Translations Robert Brambeer Design Neue Gestaltung, Berlin Picture credit Delaine Le Bas (courtesy Galerie Kai Dikhas)

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Printed by BUD, Potsdam Copy date 31.1.2016 Print run 26.000 (German edition) By-lined contributions do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editor. c Kulturstiftung des Bundes – All rights reserved. Reproduction in part or whole without prior written consent from the German Federal Cultural Foundation is strictly prohibited.

The Federal Cultural Foundation is financed by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as directed by a resolution of the German Bundestag.

Committees Advisory of the German ­Committee ­Federal Cultural Foundation

The Advisory Committee makes recommendations on the thematic focus of the Foundation’s activities. The committee is comprised of leading figures in the arts, culture, business, academics and politics.

Board of ­Trustees The Board of Trustees is responsible for making final decisions concerning the general focus of the Foundation’s activities, its funding priorities and organisational structure. The 14-member board reflects the political levels which were integral to the Foundation’s establishment.

Trustees are appointed for a five-year term.

Chairwoman of the Board Prof. Monika Grütters Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery and Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs Representing the Federal Foreign Office Prof. Dr. Maria Böhmer Minister of State Representing the Federal Ministry of Finance Jens Spahn Parliamentary State Secretary Representing the German Bundestag Prof. Dr. Norbert Lammert President of the German Bundestag Dr. h.c. Wolfgang Thierse Former President of the German Bundestag Dr. h.c. Hans-Joachim Otto Former Parliamentary State Secretary Representing the German Länder Boris Rhein Hessian State Minister for Higher Education, Research and the Arts Stephan Dorgerloh State Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs of Saxony-Anhalt Representing the German Municipalities Klaus Hebborn Councillor, Association of German Cities Uwe Lübking Councillor, Association of German Towns and Municipalities Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Cultural Foundation of German States Dr. Carsten Sieling President of the Senate and Mayor of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen Representing the fields of art and culture Prof. Dr. Bénédicte Savoy Professor of Art History Durs Grünbein Author Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolf Lepenies Sociologist

Prof. Dr. h.c. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann President of the Goethe-Institut, Chairman of the Advisory Committee Dr. Dorothea Rüland Secretary General of the DAAD, Vice Chairwoman of the Advisory Committee Prof. Dr. Clemens Börsig Chairman of the board of the Deutsche Bank Stiftung Jens Cording Commissioner of the Gesellschaft für Neue Musik Prof. Martin Maria Krüger President of the German Music Council Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen Secretary General of the Cultural Foundation of German States Dr. Volker Rodekamp Director of the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheytt President of the Cultural Policy Society Johano Strasser German P.E.N. Center Frank Werneke Deputy Chairman of the ver.di labour union Prof. Klaus Zehelein Former President of the German Theatre Association Olaf Zimmermann Managing Director of the German Cultural Council

Juries and ­curatorial panels The Federal Cultural Foundation draws on the scientific and artistic expertise of about 50 jury and curatorial panel members who advise the Foundation on thematic and project-specific matters. For more information about these committees, please visit the corresponding projects posted on our website ↗ www.kulturstiftung-­bund.de.

The Foundation Executive Board Hortensia Völckers Artistic Director Alexander Farenholtz Administrative Director Secretarial offices Beatrix Kluge / Beate Ollesch (Berlin office) / Christine Werner Assistant to the Executive Board Dr. Lutz Nitsche Contract Department Christian Plodeck (legal advisor) / Kristin Duda / Stefanie Jage / Anja Petzold Press and Public Relations Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel (dept. head) / Tinatin Eppmann / Juliane Köber / Julia Mai / Christoph Sauerbrey / Arite Studier / Therese Teutsch Programme Department Kirsten Haß (dept. head) / Torsten Maß (dept. head General Project Funding) / Teresa Darian / ­ Anke Engemann / Anne Fleckstein / Dr. Marie Cathleen Haff / Markus Huber / Antonia Lahmé / Anne Maase / Carl Philipp Nies / Uta Schnell / Karoline Weber Programme Management and Evaluation Ursula Bongaerts (dept. head) / Marius Bunk / Kristin Dögel / Marcel Gärtner / Katrin Gayda / Bärbel Hejkal / Steffi Khazhueva / Dörte Mocbeichel / Anne-Kathrin Szabó Projekt Controlling Steffen Schille (dept. head) / Franziska Gollub / Frank Lehmann / Fabian Märtin / Saskia Seidel / Antje Wagner Administration Andreas Heimann (dept. head) / Margit Ducke / Maik Jacob / Steffen Rothe

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