February at Lettrétage lets our English-speaking audience forget the cold and bitterness of the Berlin winter: You cannot only enjoy a Mediterranean flare and lots of magic but also an atmosphere of amazing vibrations, good times, inherent hope and love manifestations. But before anyone becomes overstimulated, the program brings you down to earth with an evening dedicated to the meaning of ‘humble’. Sounds like over the top? See for yourself by attending either 8¾# Poetic Hafla, Babylon – The Event of Many Tongues and Cultures – A Valentine’s Special Edition or Humble.
On December 2 and 12, the Berlin artist collective Soul And The City will organize two events at Lettrétage!
Soul And The City brings together various representatives from the fields of literature, performance, performing arts and visual arts on one stage in order to fuse different art forms in practice as well as to open up space for a theoretical examination of transdisciplinary artistic work. The aim is to point out the social interdependencies of our society through the fusion of different artistic approaches and to illustrate what art can mean in socio-political terms. By focusing on artistic collaboration in practice, the collective promotes not only entertaining, but above all educational aspects of interpersonal exchange and thus establishes art as a factor of social engagement.
Many of you have already noticed: The Berlin Senate has passed another amendment to the Infection Protection Measures Ordinance. This means: For all events in the Lettrétage, 2G applies as of today. Visitors to Lettrétage must be vaccinated and/or recovered. This applies to all events regardless of size: public evening events as well as room use and dayuse. We also ask all our visitors to wear a mask in the rooms of Lettrétage.
Please take care of each other and let us get through the next weeks together! We are looking forward to seeing you.
People meeting online via video conference flat vector illustration. Cartoon group of colleagues on virtual collective chat during lockdown. Videoconference and digital technology concept
On Friday, June 4th, schreiben & leben is offering a free Multilingual Advisement Day, covering all questions concerning your application for the Research stipend for literature in non-German language granted by the Berlin Senate.
For the first time, the Berlin Senate will award research stipends in the field of literature in non-German language. The application deadline is 6:00 p.m. on 15.06.2021. The research stipends are intended to promote the diversity and quality of literary works produced in Berlin by supporting new ideas and approaches. The target group are authors of literature (fiction, prose, poetry and books for children and young adults, no plays) who write in a language other than German, and translators who translate literature (fiction, prose, poetry and books for children and young adults, no plays) from German into another language. The authors and translators should have already proven themselves through publications. The research stipends are endowed with 8.000 € each and will be paid in two instalments in November and December 2021. The application must be submitted online. More information regarding the eligibility and criteria to be found here: INFO.
We are offering free multilingual Advisement Sessions for the Work Stipends for literature in languages other than German on the 5th and 7th of May!
What: Multilingual Advisement Days When: 05.05.2021 (10.00-11.30 am) and 07.05.2021 (16.00-17.30 pm) How: Group advisement sessions via Zoom-Video-Conference Available languages: English, French, Polish, Russian, Spanish The general Q&A at the beginning of each session is held in English and open also for writers from other language areas as those offered in the breakout rooms. Free of charge upon registration
From 13th to 15th November we brought together international literary event organizers and Berlin activists in an online conference to discuss new ways of communicating literature. Important questions were about the visualization of the underrepresented groups, the digital world experience and the dynamics of personal self-empowerment using digital tools.
Results achieved on the conference are now available here.
Sponsors of the conference were the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, and the Austrian Cultural Forum.
In B.A.U.
you enter uncharted artistic territory in the company of five artists from
Germany and Russia. Using cardboard VR goggles your smartphone can be
transformed into a gate to virtual reality, where you can move through five
spaces, filled with animated deities, giant Lenin heads and spherical sounds,
as well as interact with artistic objects created especially for this app.
B.A.U. isn’t a virtual exhibition – as a user you dive into artistic worlds.
B.A.U. also doesn’t try to simply translate literary and cultural mediation
from analogue to digital. It specifically uses the possibilities of new media
to open up a new field of experimentation.
At the
initiative of the Goethe-Institute Novosibirsk and the Berlin house of literature Lettrétage
three Berlin artists – Mara Genschel, Katia Sophia Ditzler and Tomomi Adachi – together
with two Novosibirsk artists – Alexey Grishchenko and Evgenii Gavrilov – posed
the question: How can international artistic co-operation look like in times of
digitalization and a global pandemic? B.A.U. resulted as the answer, a virtual
reality app that not only presents digital art but was also formed because of a
digital co-operation. Without meeting one single time in person the five
participants created five spaces, where they integrated the work of their
partners, created for this occasion, adapted it and finally transformed it to a
collaborative artistic synthesis.
This week we continue our series in which we present videos from the online platform MIXTAPE. This project is a collaboration of the “SARDAM interdisciplinary literature festival” and the Cultural Section of the Cyprus High Commission in the UK and is aiming at showcasing the work of Cypriot and international writers-performers. MIXTAPE offers a taste of several trends related to literature and literary performance, including videos of spoken word (slamming), sound poetry, visual poetry, literature in relation to video art, literature about sound/music, as well as conversations about writing and literary performance and an online creative writing workshop.
Pavlina Marvins contribution with the title “Turn off the lighthouses for Ivan Ismailovic”, which we want to present to you this week, demonstrates an exciting link of poetry, music, and acting/mime. Her text, which is read by the author herself in greek and displayed on the screen with english subtitles, tells the story of Ivan Ismailovic and his cat’s journey to the country of the narrator. Tense music and the mime and gestures of three performers accompany the presentation.
Pavlina Marvin, who initially studied history in Athens, was invited to several interdisciplinary art projects and festivals as an author and performer in the past. Her first book “Histories from all around my world” was published in 2017 and was awarded by the Hellenic Authors Association with the prize «Yannis Varveris». You can watch her contribution to MIXTAPE here.
This week we continue our series in which we present videos from the online platform MIXTAPE. This project is a collaboration of the “SARDAM interdisciplinary literature festival” and the Cultural Section of the Cyprus High Commission in the UK and is aiming at showcasing the work of Cypriot and international writers-performers. MIXTAPE offers a taste of several trends related to literature and literary performance, including videos of spoken word (slamming), sound poetry, visual poetry, literature in relation to video art, literature about sound/music, as well as conversations about writing and literary performance and an online creative writing workshop.
In her contribution, the Greek-Cypriot poet Avgi Lilli connects Poetry and Video. The footage for “An evening in June” allows a view of what could be a river or lake at first, before we find out that it´s a (run down) outdoor pool which was actually being filmed. The scene is accompanied by a poem, which is read by the author in Greek, with English subtitles on the screen.
Avgi Lilli publishes poems in greek and writes scripts for short films. MIXTAPE describes her work as follows: “As a poet she focuses on the deconstruction (“distillation”) of language and meaning, while also exploring the multidisciplinary aspects of poetry and its interaction with visual and performance art.” You can find the video for “An evening in June” here.
We continue our series in which we present videos from the online platform MIXTAPE. This project is a collaboration of the “SARDAM interdisciplinary literature festival” and the Cultural Section of the Cyprus High Commission in the UK and is aiming at showcasing the work of Cypriot and international writers-performers. MIXTAPE offers a taste of several trends related to literature and literary performance, including videos of spoken word (slamming), sound poetry, visual poetry, literature in relation to video art, literature in relation to sound/music, as well as conversations about writing and literary performance and an online creative writing workshop.
This time we present “Chan – The Way” by Michael-Angelos Englezo – a combination of poetry and video. Footage of a city tour at night is accompanied by a Buddhist poem from the 6th century, which was translated into English. The text is recited by a computer-generated voice. As the artist himself puts it:
“This is not an endorsement of any religious tenet, principle, doctrine or dogma. This is a construed projection of the philosophical idea of Nondualism, in other words, the overcoming of the sensory percept of apparent universal multiplicity and its reduction to one essential and undivided reality. As above so below.”
