Lettrétage

What our English-language events have in common this month is love: a strange love that lasts beyond the grave, a love-hate relationship with a city, and the first love of a girl who becomes a woman. When love and the grave are mentioned in the same breath, the gothic novel is not far away. Heather Parry’s ORPHEUS BUIDLS A GIRL draws on this genre to unfold a tale of deranged obsession. Joseph Roth did not like Berlin. At the same time, it can be said that the years he spent in the German capital were one of the most successful periods of his career. WHAT WE SEE: JOSEPH ROTH AND OUR BERLIN features a discussion of Roth, his life and his feuilletons, as well as readings of texts inspired by him. THE FIRST WOMAN by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi tells a cross-generational story about growing up, first love, being and becoming a woman, and the search for one’s own roots. A story between traditional and modern feminisms against the backdrop of Idi Amin’s violent regime in Uganda in the 1970s.

Unfortunately, UNVEILING IRAN: VOICES FROM AFAR on 21 March has to be cancelled. We will inform you as soon as possible about a possible alternative date.

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.

Continue reading “Interview with “Soul and the City””

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 day use. 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.

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

Continue reading “Multilingual Advisement Days: Work Stipends for literature in languages other than German”

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.

Continue reading “We are launching the Virtual-Reality-App B.A.U.”