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.”
During the next weeks, we would like to introduce a few 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.
The text of the first performance that we want to introduce to you was written by Maria A. Ioannou. She is an artist – some of you may already know her from our reading series “con_text” – and also the curator of the online platform. Her performance “Minimarket” presents the stream of consciousness of a 50-year-old woman who works at a kiosk, through the combination of live reading and live sound/music. The text is also part of a series of monologues written in the Cypriot dialect, which investigate the position of women in the Cypriot society. You can take a look at the video of her performance via this link.
What: Multilingual Advisement Days When: 03.06.2020 and 12.06.2020 How: Individual advisement sessions via Telefon or Video-Conference Available Languages: Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Turkish Free of charge upon registration
How to publish a poem without funding? Which DIY formats are poets coming up with beyond traditional collections? Which possibilities do Facebook, Twitter and Instagram offer when it comes to circulating poetry and digital self-publishing?
On January 24th “Poetic Chapbook in the Digital age” showcased 38 of the printed and digital Innovations of the low- to no-budget spectrum of the literary pubishing scene at Lettrétage. Everything was offered, ranging from Chapbooks, meaning DIY poem collections, self-made copies and stapled leaflets to digital formats such as Instagram poems and freely circulating PDFs. The exhibition now goes online as curator Nina Medved continues her project, documenting her most eccentric findings on our Website/Blog.
Indie lit might be little, but in Berlin it’s literally everywhere: lighting up writers’ balconies and translators’ kitchen tables, readings in bars and event spaces, hand-bound magazines and limited edition poetry collections. Being everywhere at once is our superpower. But just for tonight, let’s put down our pens and microphones and converge in one place. Toast each other’s hard work. Shake it all off on the dance floor. We’ve earned it. Wherever we are, we’re lit.
We would like to introduce a new series of interviews featuring literary reading series and projects in Berlin. To kick it off, we spoke with Traci Kim, the founder of “Literally Speaking“, a monthly reading series dedicated to English-speaking authors in Berlin. The series has become an important get-together for an exceptionally diverse community.
“Literally Speaking” recently celebrated its second anniversary. The fact that the English-speaking writer’s community in Berlin has been given such a dependable stage is largely due to its busy, seemingly never-tired advocate and curator Traci Kim.
