Unless otherwise indicated, the events of the 24th poesiefestival berlin (June 09 to June 16, 2023) will take place at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg 10.

Friday, 2.6.

2:00 PM

BROKEN MACHINES & WILD IMAGININGS

Exhibition by JUNGE AKADEMIE, AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE

Halle 1 + 2

2.6. – 9.7.

Tue – Fri 2 – 7 pm & Sat / Sun 11 am – 7 pm

 

The Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings exhibition presents ten new installations by JUNGE AKADEMIE fellows, who artistically explore artificial intelligence. The focus is on speculative and experimental practices that articulate and question the handling of power and ethics in the context of AI. The artists respond to the fragile reality of machines and their extractivist logic, algorithmic violence and techno-solutionism with poetic worlds and playful concepts as well as strategies of repair. They develop alternative paradigms, histories and ideas of technologies and a digital life beyond the systems of Big Tech. The themes of the multimedia installations range from deep-sea cables as historical channels for power to indigenous technologies and cosmologies, AI-based models of humans, queer and decolonial computing, and the question of digital immortality.

Sunday, 4.6.

12:00 PM

Poets’ Corner in Pankow – Prenzlauer Berg

Workshop: Vinyasa Yoga & Writing

Haus für Poesie | Knaackstr. 97 | 10435 Berlin

 

Writing is a physical process. It is our body through which a text finds expression. With its workshops and classes, WOW & FANCE opens spaces to explore a body-oriented, holistic writing practice.

 

with Kern, Jelena, Nitsche, Saskia

3:00 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Pankow – Prenzlauer Berg

Workshop: Voicing Language

Haus für Poesie | Knaackstr. 97 | 10435 Berlin

 

Berlin speaks different languages. What ways and possibilities do sounds and noises offer to discover new spaces and forms of a common (sound) language? As part of this year’s Poets’ Corner, we invite you in advance to an experimental workshop with the poet and artist Amora C. Bosco and the opera singer and performer Rupert Enticknap and try to explore different ways of translating poetry through and with our voices and bodies. 

 

with Enticknap, Rupert, Bosco, Amora C.

7:00 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Pankow – Prenzlauer Berg

Workshop: Yin Yoga & Writing

Haus für Poesie | Knaackstr. 97 | 10435 Berlin

 

Writing is a physical process. It is our body through which a text finds expression. With its workshops and classes, WOW & FANCE opens spaces to explore a body-oriented, holistic writing practice.   

 

with Kern, Jelena, Nitsche, Saskia

Monday, 5.6.

6:00 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Marzahn-Hellersdorf

Inselspringen

Bezirkszentralbibliothek Mark Twain | Marzahner Promenade 55 | 12679 Berlin

 

Hidden in the Freizeitforum Marzahn is one of Berlin’s most idyllic islands, the Mark Twain District Central Library. Here we can find shelter under indoor palms, enjoy unexpected views and discover skyscrapers that rise into the sky like distant mountains. Before and after the poets guide us through the various floors and present their poems, we can spend some free time in the inner courtyard or snorkel down to the bottom of the adjacent indoor pool next to the library. The texts of the participating poets, Pascal Bovée, Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova, Jorinde Minna Markert, Cleo Wächter are also exploratory, playful and investigative. They will be accompanied on this evening by the Marzahn pianist Thomas Krüger. In addition, the library’s writing workshop, which brings together and promotes young talents of the district every 1st Saturday of the month, will exhibit texts.

 

with Bovée, Pascal, Härtelova, Magdalena Jadwiga, Markert, Jorinde Minna, Wächter, Cleo

7:00 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Spandau

Staffellauf

Meeting place: in front of Rathaus Spandau | Carl-Schurz-Straße 2-6 | 13597 Berlin

 

Those who have travelled here from the inner city will land on Immoscout immediately after this poetic walk. We are there already and have entered Spandau in the search field. With shining eyes and a Florida ice cream in our hands, we listen to the poets’ texts. We meander through the old town, enjoy the view of the water and set off for new shores. We have long forgotten everything that lies within the Ring. 

 

with Hu, Tung-Hui, Schnickmann, Alexander, Sultani, Sada, Riedißer, Ansgar

Tuesday, 6.6.

5:30 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Mitte – Wedding

Poets’ Corner meets Cashmere Radio

Cashmere Radio | online or registration under info@cashmereradio.com

 

Cashmere Radio is a non-profit radio station based in Wedding. The broadcasts range between various experimental sound and language as well as steadily growing, standard radio formats. In addition to online broadcasting, the station is also open to the public and offers the neighbourhood and interested parties the opportunity to look behind the scenes.

 

with Drago, Lou, Knox, Bitsy, Poulou, Eleni, HASHIA

6:00 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf

Zum Glück im Hof ein Baum

Villa Oppenheim | Schloßstraße 55 | Otto-Grünberg-Weg | 14059 Berlin

 

Searching for traces and snatches: this evening at Villa Oppenheim tries to highlight life with all its experiences and memories or simply small observations from vitrines, to bring it to life and make it accessible. Different approaches and perspectives of a big city create encounters in the blossoming park in front of the Wilhelminian style villa “Sorgenfrei”, which since 2012 has been home to the Museum of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, which is dedicated to researching and communicating the district’s urban history.

 

with Benrath, Ruth Johanna, Happel, Wilfried, Matar, Faris, Pape, Elisabeth, Severin, Tillmann

6:00 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg

Watching Things Grow

Floating University | Lilienthalstraße 32 | 10965 Berlin

 

Since 2018, the former rainwater retention pool has been open to the public as a Floating University, a place for gathering, sharing and learning. Floating University also stands for a space created by humans, which nature has reclaimed over the years and now continues to exist in an exchange between humans, animals and nature and relies on sustainable, solidary interconnections. While new species are emerging and growing here, a unique architecture has also developed that is open to the neighbourhood and the inhabitans of Berlin as an opportunity for social and cultural participation. The interaction with existing Naturecultures also shapes the texts of the readers in various ways. All of them have already encountered the Floating in their own practice and will refer to the unique place in their texts.

 

with Cremer, Elke, hn. lyonga, Reißer, Johann, Seeger, Ursula, Mangan, Felicity

7:00 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg

Beyond Bodies

Bezirkszentralbibliothek Pablo Neruda | Frankfurter Allee 14A | 10247 Berlin

 

What happens when I speak my body into space? Can I transfer it into an alternative state? Demarginalize it? Expand or dissolve its boundaries? Multiply it? Heal it? At Poets’ Corner Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg in the Bezirkszentralbibliothek Pablo Neruda, a preoccupation with the body meets an interest in orality, performance, and transdisciplinarity. The female body, the maternal body, the Black body, the injured body become the starting points of a poetic speech that begins where language always already originates – in the body – and that attempts to open up new spaces in which it can unfold.

 

with Ilupeju, Monilola Olayemi, Montsho, Goitseone, Toth, Kinga, Isasi Armengod

7:30 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Pankow – Prenzlauer Berg

Zukunft erinnern

Friedhof St. Marien und St. Nikolai I | Prenzlauer Allee 1 | 10405 Berlin

 

St. Marien- und St. Nikolai-Friedhof I in Prenzlauer Berg is perhaps the most beautiful cemetery in Berlin. Wild growth, winding paths, impressive grave monuments, an interesting history, guided tours on wild herbs, and the Verwalterhaus at its entrance, where current art and culture are on display: An acoustic island in the midst of the city noise, a small biotope in the concrete landscape. This is a place with a special temporality, where past and future are closely interwoven. Here we want to practice foreboding, which is expressed by the same word as ancestor in German language: How much future may be found in remembering? What can roots tell me about the future? Can I build portals? Can I learn to remember differently, better? More optimistically? Can language help me to do this? Can I help the language to do this? 

 

with Bulucz, Alexandru, Hapeyeva, Volha, Othman, Inana, Robles, Ingeborg, Hardy, Marie-Pascale

Wednesday, 7.6.

6:00 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Mitte

Beyond Languages

Bärenzwinger | Rungestraße 30 | 10179 Berlin

 

A visit to Bärenzwinger Berlin can feel like stepping onto an island: The original architecture includes two outdoor terraces and moats that used to be filled with water. The water kept the bears inside and visitors at a distance. Today, the spaces of the former kennel are a communal gallery. The artistic programme aims to work with and against the violent legacy of the space.

 

with Kunak, Göksu, Ruveyda, Al-Qaisi, Jasmina

6:00 PM

+++postponed+++Poets‘ Corner in Lichtenberg   

+++POSTPONED+++Poets’ Corner meets Handverlesen

Kunsthaus 360° | Prerower Platz 10 | 13051 Berlin

 

Gebärdensprachliche Literatur stellt die traditionelle Definition von Literatur als Text in Frage und findet eine lyrische und erzählende Sprache jenseits von Schrift und Wort. Das Projekt „Handverlesen“ bringt gebärdensprachliche und lautsprachliche Poesie in den Dialog: hörende und Taube Lyriker:innen übersetzen gegenseitig ihre Gedichte, von der Lautsprache in die Gebärdensprache und umgekehrt. Zwei Lyriker:innen aus dem Projekt und die Initiatiorin Franziska Winkler präsentieren ihre Übersetzungen und sprechen im Anschluss über ihre Erfahrungen in den Übersetzungsprozessen. 

 

with Hetzer, Anna

8:00 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Mitte – Moabit

Konstellationen: Der Weltraum in der Tragetasche

ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik | Siemensstraße 27 | 10551 Berlin

 

In her famous essay Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on the narratives of collecting – by means of a container, such as a carrier bag, in which the individual elements lie non-hierarchically next to, above, and below one another, the connections are loose, and the possibilities for linking are manifold – like constellations that form, dissolve, and come together anew.

While the ZK/U is under construction, we ask about the coherence of things. What happens in the in-between, when no stone is left unturned. The Urban Stage is a smaller version of the roof terrace that will grace the ZK/U at the end of the renovation work. A few meters closer to the Cosmos, here we dare to look up at the starry sky and contemplate lyrical constellations.

with Cerda, Carla, Goldhorn, Marius, Ranga, Dana, Rosenberg, Johannes

Thursday, 8.6.

7:00 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Treptow-Köpenick

Making Of: Werkstattgespräche

Novilla | Hasselwerderstraße 22 | 12439 Berlin

 

What makes my poem tick? Where does it come from? How can it be captured? How often does it need to be fed and petted? What outfit does it like best? Does my poem like to go to the zoo?  

We peek into literary workshops. Through material brought by the poets, we try to get a little closer to the mystery of poetic texts. We tug at the curtain, ask to be let into the poem. We look around. We walk the construction site. We dive into beginnings. We take a seat on the couch and never leave. Can you please let me get close to you? 

with Gonzalez Hesaynes, Rita, Rüegger, Julia, Rudolfi, Alexander, Šehić, Faruk, Tharayil, Ralph, Wittig, Mirjam, Harres, Lisa

7:30 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Pankow – Weißensee

Durch Sprachen driften: Mehrsprachige Lyrik

Brotfabrik | Caligariplatz 1 | 13086 Berlin

 

What languages are used in Berlin’s poetry? How do they mix? What new languages emerge in Berlin’s poetry? What worlds of experience does multilingual poetry negotiate and what creative potential does it hold? 

The multilingual poem takes a close look at language. It illuminates its functions and effects and lets us experience different perceptions that are expressed through languages. The multilingual poem exposes the materiality of language. It works on and it changes language, it shows the inherent mutability of language. Through multilingual poetry we experience how identities are formed in and between languages and how language and a sense of home are interwoven. By evading the claim of universal readability, the multilingual poem writes actively against hierarchizations between languages and writing systems and thus becomes a gesture of resistance. 

with Choi, Don Mee, Güzel, Lütfiye, Kennel, Odile, Rinne, Cia

7:30 PM

Poet’s Corner Spezial Steglitz-Zehlendorf: Im JUNIVERSUM von Monika Rinck

This evening stages poetry and its translation as a collective experience. Many international perspectives on Monika Rinck’s poems will come together: Together with the author, the participants of the international poetry translators’ meeting JUNIVERS will discuss her texts live and make the poems heard in many linguistic worlds. The finissage of the exhibition “drifting accumulation Minsk” curated by Iryna Herasimovitch and Marcus Reichmann will be celebrated. Artist Antonina Slobodchikova will navigate us through her project “es ist da”, which also appropriates a poem by Monika Rinck through formulaic repetition and transforms it into collages, objects and video works.

With: Nicholas Grindell, Cecilia Hansson, Mohammad Hemati, Iryna Herasimovich, Dong Li, Camille Luscher, Ton Naaijkens, Monika Rinck, Antonina Slobodchikova. Moderation: Marie Luise Knott.

Curation: Aurélie Maurin. Project management: Peter Dietze.

JUNIVERS is a project of the TOLEDO programme of the German Translator’s Fund in cooperation with the Literary Colloquium Berlin and the Poetry Festival Berlin – funded by Neustart Kultur and the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung.

8:00 PM

Poets‘ Corner in Neukölln

Kein Mensch ist eine Insel: Gemeinsam arbeiten

Ada Bar | Sonnenallee 100 | 12045 Berlin

 

Collectives are sprouting up all around us. And we, too, long for complicity, want to form gangs. The collective can be a safe space for exchange, criticism and practice. A step between the drawer and a larger audience. A place where common ideas can be formed and captured in an open and multi-perspective way.   

Where does this desire for collective structures come from? And what influence do they have on the creative workflow? How does a text change in a shared space? Does anything here still belong to me? How does a poetry collective relate to the literary establishment, and does the lyric form hold a particular collective potential?  

with Engst, Anja, Hauser, Sara, Omar, Stix, Schraven, Hannah, fährten

Friday, 9.6.

7:30 PM

Weltklang

Night Of Poetry

Großes Parkett | 14/9€ inkl. Anthologie Tickets

 

Weltklang – Night of Poetry is poesiefestival berlin’s prismatic and panoramic opening. Poets will read, sing, and perform in their source languages, demonstrating the full spectrum of contemporary poetry: its power, its diversity of approaches and styles. Just for the event, an anthology will be published in German and English so that audience members can read along with the poems presented onstage.

 

with Aftab, Arooj, Arai, Takako, Barskova, Polina, Brolaski, Julian Talamantez, Fabias, Radna, Kandasamy, Meena, Kunial, Zaffar

Saturday, 10.6.

11:00 AM

POETRY TALK: Arooj Aftab

In This Desolate World, Breathe

Clubraum 7/5€ | Tickets

Arooj Aftab is a Grammy award winning singer, composer, and producer who works in various musical styles and idioms, including jazz, minimalism, and Urdu poetry. Arooj Aftab was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents. Her family returned to Pakistan in the ’90s, where Aftab found inspiration in Lahore’s lush gardens, intricate architecture, and poetry.

She has been named one of NPR’s Top 100 composers, and has been featured on several best concerts lists, including The New York Times. Her Vulture Prince album was met with critical acclaim from The Guardian, Time Magazine, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. Aftab has performed at major international music festivals including Coachella, Glastonbury, Primavera Sound Barcelona, Roskilde Festival, and Montreal Jazz Festival. She has also performed at Performance Art Centers such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, and The Broad. Aftab is a 2023 United States Artists Fellow and a recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Music.

Arooj Aftab will speak about her work and the relationship between words and music.

Moderation: Ralph Tharayil

with Aftab, Arooj

1:00 PM

Buchengarten Readings

Buchengarten | Free admission

On the festival weekend, Akademie der Künste turns into a poetic hidden-object picture. More than 40 poets and translators will read in the Buchengarten on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Poetry volumes and journals can be purchased at the book market on Sunday.

with Ahmadi, Pegah, Atfah, Lina, Casanyes, Mireia, Cotten, Ann, Debeljak, Lukas, Falb, Daniel, Farnbacher, Tabea, Ferretti, Giorgio, Fuad, Tracy, Grünbein, Durs, Lobejäger, Rosa, Oleschinski, Brigitte, Ostashevsky, Eugene, Patterson, James Conor, Pichler, Greta Maria, Preiwuß, Kerstin, Schadt, Kathrin, Shemoelof, Mati, Sielaff, Volker, Stawenow, Konstantin, Wenzel, Christoph, Zarka, Hanadi

3:30 PM

Die drei Jahreszeiten (The three Seasons)

Diorama of a More-Than-Human Revolution

Installation from Friday, 9.6. until Friday, 16.6. | Halle 3

Premiere live: 10.6. 3.30 pm

 

The climate on earth has finally and fundamentally changed. The sun relentlessly burns down, the oceans keep rising, and snow only exists as an idea. In the midst of this climatological catastrophe, a socio-ecological revolution is taking place. Humans, animals, and plants come together to practice a new togetherness on this damaged planet. A movement is growing, and their destination is Berlin. “The Three Seasons” is a diorama in various forms: simultaneously kinetic installation, video art, poem, radio play, perhaps even opera – maximalism in a small box. The diorama mourns the world as we know it, looks forward to the coming evolution, and discovers a future that has long since begun.

“The Three Seasons” is based on the long poem “wir zaudern, wir brennen” by Tim Holland.

 

6:00 PM

POETRY TALK: Takako Arai

Spitting Out Silk Forever

Clubraum 7/5€ | Tickets

 

In her work, Takako Arai (born in Kiryū, Japan, in 1966) explores Japan’s history in the age of globalization and neoliberalism. Some of her best-known poems depict the textile industry’s decline in Gunma Prefecture, where her father owned an old-fashioned weaving mill. The women workers employed at the mill form the core of her avant-garde, politically engaged poems. Arai is famous for her bold, sometimes disturbing imagery, which critics have described as “wormlike.” In her poems, she skillfully uses different registers, rewriting familiar children’s songs or writing in phonetically-transcribed dialect. Takako Arai will speak about her work and read poems translated especially for the event.

 

with Arai, Takako

7:30 PM

WRITING VIOLENCE

Kleines Parkett 8/6 € | Tickets

 

With Kemi Alabi, Yevgeniy Breyger, Kholoud Charaf, Athena Farrokhzad, Madara Gruntmane, Ramin Mazhar and Ganna Gryniva (music), moderated by Bohdan Tokarskyi

Violence can be silent – but it can also develop its own language. How might we counter violence with another language, one that does not further stigmatize its victims or – in the worst case – re-traumatize them? This evening’s poets will contend with different forms of violence: authoritarian regimes, censorship, war and civil war, forced migration, flight, and expulsion – but also everyday violence, racist police profiling, violence against LGTBQIA* people, femicides, or sexualized violence within the family or community. Poetry can both document and remember violence, but can also initiate therapeutic processes, extending the opportunity for solidarity and healing.

 

with Alabi, Kemi, Breyger, Yevgeniy, Charaf, Kholoud, Farrokhzad, Athena, Gruntmane, Madara, Mazhar, Ramin, Gryniva, Ganna

Sunday, 11.6.

1:00 PM

Buchengarten Readings

Buchengarten | Free admission

On the festival weekend, Akademie der Künste turns into a poetic hidden-object picture. More than 40 poets and translators will read in the Buchengarten on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Poetry volumes and journals can be purchased at the book market on Sunday.

with Beyer, Marcel, Bresemann, Tom, Currle, Hannes, Doğan, Nail, Dorsch, Julia, Dunajcsik, Mátyás, egger xan; seefried neo, Gómez, Sara, Hemati, Mohammad, Hensel, Kerstin, Jaud, Carmen, Klimke, Christoph, Li, Dong, Lian, Yang, Menges, Lea, Menke, Regina, Sigurdardóttir, Steinunn, Trompeter, Julia, Jan Wagner, Zamrik, Sam, Nwulu, Selina

1:00 PM

LYRIKMARKT

Poetry market

Studiofoyer & Vorplatz | Free admission

On the festival weekend, Akademie der Künste turns into a poetic hidden-object picture. More than 40 poets and translators will read in the Buchengarten on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Poetry volumes and journals can be purchased at the book market on Sunday.

 

3:30 PM

POETRY TALK: Kemi Alabi and Radna Fabias

Ungoverned By The Lie

Clubraum 7/5€ | Tickets

 

The debut collections of poets Kemi Alabi (born 1990 in Wisconsin) and Radna Fabias (born 1983 in Curaçao) both caused a stir. Each of these works contend with racism, sexism, poverty, and violence. Their work contends with the relationship between Blackness and feminism, finding intimate, at times pixelated images of rebellion, love, and desire.

with Alabi, Kemi, Fabias, Radna

5:30 PM

POETRY TALK: Yevgeniy Breyger & Madara Gruntmane

Es tut weh, das heißt: Du bist am Leben (It Hurts, Thus: You’re Alive)

Clubraum 7/5€ | Tickets

Yevgeniy Breyger (born in Kharkiv in 1989) and Madara Gruntmane (born in Liepāja in 1981) are united in their search for an empathetic language and their search for what it means to write poetry in the face of violence.

with Breyger, Yevgeniy, Gruntmane, Madara

7:30 PM

2023 Berlin Poetry Lecture – Kim Hyesoon

Tongueless Mother Tongue

Kleines Parkett 6/4€ | Tickets

 

Kim Hyesoon‘s (born 1955 in Uljin, Kyŏngsangbuk-do, South Korea) poetry lecture begins by recollecting the last days of the Fourth Republic (1972-1979), a time of economic growth and state repression in South Korea, when she herself worked in publishing as an editor and repeatedly witnessed state censorship. Books were banned; individual passages considered offensive were blackened with coal tar; she even attended an entirely censored play, performed without text. From this experience – the tongue’s dying before actual death – she develops a poetics of her own writing in the sign of absence: Poets connect with their deaths, use ghost voices preceding language, are capable of absorbing other voices and sounds. In Kim Hyesoon’s poetry, this creates a rich register between silences, sighs, cries, and moans. And reading a poem means inhaling spirits, putting readers in a state of being possessed.

 

with Hyesoon, Kim

Monday, 12.6.

11:00 AM

We Have Everything We Need

Award Ceremony and Reading with Selina Nwulu

Clubraum

 

For the fourth time, the British Council and Haus für Poesie are hosting the English-German School Poetry Competition. This year’s guest poet is Selina Nwulu. Together with the Deputy Director of Haus für Poesie Matthias Kniep and the Director of the British Council Germany Paul Smith, she will honor four prize winners from all over Germany and read from their work herself.

Selina Nwulu is a poet of Nigerian origin. She was Young Poet Laureate for London 2015-16 and shortlisted for the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and is a finalist for the 2021 Arts Award for Environmental Writing. Her debut collection, A Little Resurrection (Bloomsbury 2022), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was named Book of the Year by the Irish Times.

 

3:30 PM

POETRY TALK: Kim Hyesoon & Don Mee Choi & Sool Park & Uljana Wolf

A Ghost of Collectivity

Clubraum 7/5€ | Tickets

 

Kim Hyesoon (born 1955 in Uljin, Kyŏngsangbuk-do, South Korea) is one of the world’s most important poets, but remains comparatively under-read in Germany. Her books, often described as surreal, are books of the dead, too. With work at once comic, abysmal, and disturbing, Kim Hyesoon builds phantasmagorical, imagistic worlds – fever dreams, traversed by camels and other beings. These poems include mermaids who ponder their twin nature, stones that give birth to rocks which transform into dogs, and deities presiding over festering garbage dumps.

with Hyesoon, Kim, Choi, Don Mee, Wolf, Uljana

5:30 PM

POETRY TALK: Meena Kandasamy and Zaffar Kunial

Where Losses And Times Fold

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE IN PROGRAM: The poetry talk will be solely with Zaffar Kunial. Matthias Kniep will host the talk.

Clubraum 7/5€ | Tickets

In their writings, poets Meena Kandasamy (born 1984 in Tamil Nadu, India) and Zaffar Kunial (born in Birmingham) contend with processes of social stratification, cultural codification, inclusion, and exclusion. Kandasamy is critical of the caste system in India and fights for womens’ rights. Her language is plaintive, addressing readers directly: “I want a word that waits and weeps and hesitates,” one of her poems reads, the title of which can be understood as a self-portrait: “a wild woman on a word hunt.” Kunial’s poems are more indirectly political, addressing themes of identity and belonging with personal family history – Kunial is the son of a British primary school teacher and a Kashmir factory worker – as well as the sport of cricket. Kunial, who himself wanted to become a professional player, published a pamphlet of poems (“Six”, Faber & Faber 2019) devoted solely to the subject. In one of the poems, he writes, “my bat felt as heavy as England.”

 

with Kandasamy, Meena, Kunial, Zaffar

7:30 PM

POETRY TALK: Eileen Myles & Alice Notley

Offering The Healing Of Words Reading & Conversation

Kleines Parkett 7/5 € | Tickets

 

An encounter between the second and third generations of the New York School: Alice Notley (born 1945 Bisbee, Arizona/USA) and Eileen Myles (born 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts). A mentor-student relationship, though it isn’t always clear which is which. “I’m the one who has no / small feelings,” writes Alice Notley. Her poems are fearless, visionary, shamanistic, in lively exchange with the dead (Whatever I think is heard by the dead) and the collective unconscious. The Boston Review has written that Alice Notley has freed herself from any notion of what poetry should be in order to write what poetry can be. In this and every other respect, her work is unique: “I’m only alive and am my own guide.”

with Myles, Eileen, Notley, Alice

Tuesday, 13.6.

3:00 PM

POETRY TALK: Athena Farrokhzad and Ramin Mazhar

Wenn du das Alphabet vergisst (When You Forget The Alphabet)

Clubraum 7/5€ | Tickets

 

In their poems, Athena Farrokhzad (born 1983 in Tehran) and Ramin Mazhar (born 1995 in Bamyan) contend with traumatic experiences of violence. In her long poem “white blight,” poet, playwright, critic, and translator Athena Farrokhzad interweaves memories of oppression, war, and flight without positioning herself explicitly – instead her parents, uncles, grandmother, and brother speak: “My mother said: the heart cannot be bent of its own free will like a knee.”

Poet and journalist Ramin Mazhar writes about wounds from Afghanistan’s wars, new injuries caused by girls’ schools being closed or protests being bloodily suppressed. In his poems, which he distributes via Facebook and Telegram, Mazhar articulates a poetics of defiant resistance: “To spite the murderous traditions, I love you. / (…) You are different, your kisses are your protest / (…) I kiss you amid the Taliban.” He was forced to leave Afghanistan after the Taliban regained power in 2021 and now lives in Paris.

 

5:00 PM

Transients #3

Electronic performanc, in the framework of the exhibition "Broken Machines, Wild Imaginings"

Halle 1  | Free admission

Pedro Oliveira – Mel-filterbank

TRANSIENTS looks closely at the history of the technologies expressed in the work The Emotional Residue of an Unnatural Boundary, taking them into speculative realms of possibility towards many futures. By engaging with the materiality of filtered sound and its aesthetic manifestation, this series of three performances expands the capabilities of thinking technical systems beyond extractivism and classification, and toward implicancy and relation.

5:30 PM

POETRY TALK: Polina Barskova & Maria Stepanova

Wo die Toten sich unter die Lebenden mischen

Clubraum 7/5€ | Tickets

Polina Barskova (born in Leningrad in 1976) and Maria Stepanova (born in Moscow in 1972) are two eminent Russian writers of their generation, sharing a strong grasp of their language’s storied, and not quite unproblematic, poetic tradition. Their writing is elicited by interactions with other literature, but remains utterly original, sensual, and erudite. As subversive imitators of voices and forms, Barskova and Stepanova’s playfulness nevertheless has a more serious backdrop, as their work always contends with histories of war. Poetry thus becomes an instrument of both documentation and resistance.

 

with Barskova, Polina, Stepanova, Maria

7:30 PM

WRITING IDENTITIES

You Are Dazzled By Their Murmurations

Kleines Parkett 8/6 € | Tickets

 

Reading and discussion with Kemi Alabi, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Kay Gabriel and Eileen Myles

U.S. American poets Kemi Alabi, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Kay Gabriel and Eileen Myles radically explore the boundaries of poetic language. In seeking to express marginalized perspectives and experiences, they question received wisdom, familiar patterns, common attributions, and powers of representation and interpretation. In their texts, these poets deconstruct existing linguistic material and reassemble it, breaking it down into component parts to expand and transform what language can achieve. Words and phrases are reinvented, the familiar and the archaic are incorporated, and completely new descriptive possibilities are forged. On this evening, the authors will read from their poems and speak about fluid identities, poetry, and re-describing the world.

 

with Alabi, Kemi, Brolaski, Julian Talamantez, Myles, Eileen, Gabriel, Kay

Wednesday, 14.6.

5:00 PM

Concert: The Quirk

in the framwork of the exhibition Broken Machines, Wild Imaginings

Halle 2 | Free admission

D’Andrade, concert

The Quirk is a concert generated from the sound archive created for the work A Thousand Years Loving You. The concert performs sound material used in the installation, offering a many-layered soundscape related to artificiality and nature. It implicitly decomposes a poem linked to each element that constitutes the installation, creating an open sound interpretation about the life of objects, humanity and remains.

More informationen on AI Anarchies and www.adk.de

This event takes place in the framework of the exhibition „Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings“, JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste.

5:30 PM

POETRY TALK: Julian Talamantez Brolaski & Kay Gabriel

And Hallooo Transmagnified Body!

Clubraum 7/5 € | Tickets

Few poets have explored the possibilities of U.S. American English in the last 15 years more persistently and imaginatively than Julian Talamantez Brolaski (born 1978 in La Jolla) and Kay Gabriel (born 1993 in Ottawa).

 

 

with Brolaski, Julian Talamantez, Gabriel, Kay

7:30 PM

WRITING MOTHERHOOD

„…grammatickt mamal aus…“

Kleines Parkett 8/6€ | Tickets

 

“How much poetic furor has been suffocated by the stench of diapers, quite literally in the muck, without even making it to the trash?” asks poet Dagmara Kraus in her polemic essay on poetry and motherhood. Other poets writing about motherhood found collectives, understandably called “CARE RAGE.”

Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Tjawangwa Dema, Athena Farrokhzad, Joanna Mueller, and Alice Notley write about motherhood, mother figures, pregnancy and childbirth, miscarriage, and abortion. In their poems, they seek a language to describe existential questions of motherhood and its archetypes.

 

with Olsen, Ursula Andkjær, Dema, Tjawangwa, Farrokhzad, Athena, Mueller, Joanna, Notley, Alice

Thursday, 15.6.

3:30 PM

POETRY TALK: Dean Bowen, Charlotte Van den Broeck & Tjawangwa Dema

The Weight Of Each Syllable Upon The Tongue

Clubraum 7/5 € | Tickets

 

Poets Dean Bowen (born 1984 in the Netherlands), Charlotte Van den Broeck (born 1991 in Belgium) and Tjawangwa Dema (born 1981 in Botswana) will read from their poems and speak with Jumoke Adeyanju about Spoken Word as a performance of sociopolitical resistance.

with Bowen, Dean, Van den Broeck, Charlotte, Dema, Tjawangwa

5:30 PM

POETRY TALK: Sarah Ciston & Swantje Lichtenstein

Filtrierung der Maschinenmaschinen

Halle 1 | Free admission

 

“Cells disappear into similarity / Distorted. Dissolved systems of analysis / Recognize anyone. I phone.” (Swantje Lichtenstein: KODE).

How can we democratically and intersectionally make use of AI (Artificial Intelligence)? How can we counter the ways that the likes of ChatGPT promote and reproduce discrimination? In this poetry conversation, poet/programmer Sarah Ciston and poet/performance artist Swantje Lichtenstein will explore these questions academically and artistically. Together with Emma Braslavsky, they will discuss intersectional decoding, knowing machines, and critical and creative approaches to working with digitality and AI. Their reading and conversation will take place in the context of the exhibition “Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings,” which will question the power structures inherent to AI (and its myriad ethical implications) through ten installations – specifically in Sarah Ciston’s labyrinth installation “No Knots, Only Loops,” a crochet sculpture composed of 36,672 stitches, forming a 64-square meter labyrinth of recurring patterns that renders AI’s material expansion quite literally tangible.

 

 

with Lichtenstein, Swantje, Ciston, Sarah

7:30 PM

SPOKEN WORD POETRY I

Far From AN Island

Großes Parkett 8/6 € | Tickets

 

PERFORMANCE

Opening your mouth means getting involved. Spoken Word is poetic, performative, political, socially engaged and artistically diverse. Over the course of two separate evenings, ten national and international poets will present their poetic work. The invited authors have written texts that bear witness to experiences of exclusion and discrimination, the struggle for sexual freedom, self-determination and climate catastrophe – or simply the search for closeness and love. Whether spoken, sung or rapped – those who speak here speak for themselves, but also for and with others. Begging the question: How can we listen to each other, learn from each other and imagine living and writing together?

 

with Aukongo, Stefanie-Lahya, Bastos, Meimei, The Scientist, Jahson, Van den Broeck, Charlotte, Ruddock, Dean

Friday, 16.6.

4:30 PM

POETRY TALK: Meimei Bastos & Elis Rita

Für diejenigen, die noch geboren werden (For Those Who Are Yet To Be Born)

Clubraum 7/5 € | Tickets

 

The world in a poem, a poem in the world – in their poems, poets Meimei Bastos and Elis Rita turn their eyes to the large and small transformations they see in the world. In this poetry conversation, they will reflect on these changes and the ways they are changed by their own writing, reflecting on the processes and inputs that precede their artistic work, and their performances onstage. Who (or what) inspires their wok? What do their poems react to? What reactions do they hope their poems might inspire, what ripple effects might they generate? Together they will consider their work’s poetic backdrop – and the horizons of future possibilities they look to.

Moderation: Angélica Freitas

with Bastos, Meimei, Rita, Elis

5:00 PM

Ghosting the Machine

in the framework of the exhibition Broken Machines, Wild Imaginings

Halle 2 | Free admission

Sahej Rahal, Performance, 20 min

Within the cybernetic sensorium of Anhad, we find a masked demon conversing with an AI simulation that has turned sentient. He whispers remnants of ancient secrets and lost histories into feral machines roaming an uninhabited forest. Soon enough, their dialogue begins to dissolve, dissimulating speech into sound at the outer limits of language. The programme starts to dance in response, emanating notes of Hindustani music carried within its limbs. It sings back, creating an infinite song across the porous boundaries of myth, machine, mind and memory.

More informationen on AI Anarchies and www.adk.de

This event takes place in the framework of the exhibition „Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings“, JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste.

7:30 PM

SPOKEN WORD POETRY II

What Is A Poem In The Face Of A Revolution?

Großes Parkett 8/6 € Tickets

 

PERFORMANCE

Opening your mouth means getting involved. Spoken Word is poetic, performative, political, socially engaged and artistically diverse. Over the course of two separate evenings, ten national and international poets will present their poetic work. The invited authors have written texts that bear witness to experiences of exclusion and discrimination, the struggle for sexual freedom, self-determination and climate catastrophe – or simply the search for closeness and love. Whether spoken, sung or rapped – those who speak here speak for themselves, but also for and with others. Begging the question: How can we listen to each other, learn from each other and imagine living and writing together?

 

with Bowen, Dean, Élémo, Rita, Elis, Sabbagh, Tanasgol, LaFleur, Jessy James

10:00 PM

CONCERT with Jahson The Scientist and band

Kleines Parkett 6/4 € | Tickets

 

Jahson The Scientist is a “wordsman” and has been described as a Spoken Word Artist, eMCee and anything in-between. Raised in both London and Montserrat (Caribbean), the Caribbean introduced him to freestyling and writing rhymes and London deepened his connection to music by crate digging for vinyl, becoming a DJ and being part of MC and DJ collectives. As a lyricist his music is centered in Hip Hop with influences of Afro-beat, Jazz and Soul, and in this concert, together with his band, Jahson The Scientist’s music will focus on humanity and potential, giving the listeners a view through the keyhole on the riddle of Adam from atoms, culture, “Black” matters, science and spirit.

 

 

with The Scientist, Jahson