All posts by Melanie Arns

Lily Michaelides and Nora Hadjisotiriou – members of IDEOGRAMMA

Ideogramma_Logo

IDEOGRAMMA will promote ‘logos ( Greek for spoken words) – poetry’ as a verbal expression which transcends the boundaries of language and other cultural and ethnic differences as well as other forms of culture.

How can we combine the different forms of art like theatre, music, dance and literature?

What could be the result and the achievement?

How is the situation of non-profit cultural organisations? What could they reach in working together?

Nora Theiss – A member of Forum Stadtpark

The FORUM STADTPARK is a place of production and presentation for contemporary art. This house, which is organized as an artists association, stands for an expanded definition of art and for an intersectional work in different areas.

How could places which are laboratories and platforms like Forum Stadtpark are an issue for a sustainable society (in regard to social, political, but also ecological aspects)?

How could such places are an issue as “real places” in the time of  World Wide Web?

If every human being is an artist – how are persons reachable, who didn’t have anything to do with Avant-Garde-Art until now?

Photo by Forum Stadtpark

 

 

Valgerður Þóroddsdóttir’s Poetry Factory @Soundout

A book is the ultimate mass-produced commodity. It is a rectangular object that stacks easily and can be made cheaply in great numbers…
What the icelandic artist group Meðgönguljóð propose for the SOUNDOUT! festival is to make the book itself an integral part of the reading process—to link readers to the books they consume on an emotional and physical level. They focus on the physical presentation of the book, on its creation, it‘s literal binding, its birth, as a literary happening.

Valgerður Þóroddsdóttir

How can we make the written word relevant in a fast-paced, visually-obsessed world?

Valgerður Þóroddsdóttir set an experimental example at Soundout

Photo by Hörður Sveinsson

What is CROWD? Evening-Events 23.01. and 24.01.

CROWD is a trans-European network of literary activists from the independent scene (authors, translators, organisers, literature bloggers, editors of literature magazines, indie publishing houses), that will meet for the first time this weekend in the Lettrétage. CROWD wants to discover all kinds of ideas of contemporary literature in Europe, to develop them collectively and to bring them into the public, Europe-wide discourse.

During the evening events of this first CROWD Conference we want to ask ourselves and you:  Which texts are nowadays relevant due to what reasons – political, aesthetical etc.? How can literature let us experience our society beyond the mere documentation of our present? In what kind of tension are therefore politics and aesthetics, tradition and experiment, author reference and reader reference involved?

Lily Michaelides (Cyprus), Max Höfler (Austria), Laura Serkosalo (Finland), Ana Pejović (Serbia), Ondřej Buddeus (Czech Republic), Andrea Inglese (Italy/France), Valgerdur Thoroddsdottir (Iceland), Inga Bodnarjuka (Latvia) and Steven Fowler (UK) will read and discuss.

Photo by gezett.de

Max Höfler’s uniqueness

“In the Austrian contemporary literature Höfler’s approach, which one can discribe as „Helge Schneider and Monty Python meet Wittgenstein, Kant and Derrida to taste schnapps“, is in any case unique. Max Höflers „Texas als Texttitel“ is an excellent debut, which is deversified and inventive, criticaly satiric and in part gloriously absurd.”

For the German among you: Read the whole critique of Literaturhaus Wien here!

Is literature only valuable, when it is unique? What makes contemporary literature unique?