CROWD – the network: vision, background

(English, 3 pages, pdf)

OMNIBUS reading tour: Information in German

(German, 2 pages, pdf)

OMNIBUS reading tour: Information in English

• aprox. 100 authors from aprox. 38 countries
• roadtrip crossing aprox. 15 countries
• start in Finland in may 2016: opening ceremony
• end in Cyprus in august 2016: closing event
• at least 40 public events: readings, discussions, workshops etc.
• aprox. 30 associated partners alongside the road

In all, aproximately  100 European writers will be sent off in a weekly rotation within a period of three months to travel through Europe from north (Finland) to south (Cyprus). On their way, they will present their texts and their ideas about literature as an offer to enter into dialogue in close contact with the people of the regions they pass through and their inhabitants. This will take place by way of large readings in the cities at the beginning or/and end of each weekly leg, while during the week there will be additional daily interaction outside the readings, such as visits to retirement homes and schools.

CROWD finds: in Europe there is too much talking going on over each other and not enough with each other. The OMNIBUS reading tour is intended to change that, not only in relation to the various nations and regions, but also in relation to the rural and the urban space, the less-educated levels of society and the “intellectual”.
As well as literary initiatives, literature houses, literature festivals and literary institutions, the bus will therefore also be visiting schools, hospitals and universities as well as villages and communities along the route, places that have a lot to do with literature as well as those with little to do with it.

Europe of the regions
Each leg of the trip will be accompanied and actively shaped by the associated partner from the region being travelled. The associated partners will organise accommodation for the bus passengers and will be their language and topographical guides in their regions. A dense network of contacts will be established along the route, promoting long-term personal relationships. All participants are equally important parts of the network, with their own special abilities and methods.

Europe between languages
The writers travelling on the bus will be selected on the basis of their positions in their own scenes and countries. The OMNIBUS reading tour demonstrates the diversity of Europe, so writers from diverse cultural backgrounds will be travelling on it, writers who in themselves occupy intermediate positions, whether it be on account of their origin or their dissemination activities or their being multi-lingual – writers of various ages, with various focuses of experience or genre.

During the tour, the writers will not only be reading but also, with the aid of interpreters and continuously prepared gloss translations, contribute as they go to writing together a large, meandering text on a giant scroll. The text thus created will be unrolled at every stop to illustrate the idea of literature as an opportunity for meeting. The form of its presentation on a large scroll, written on laterally, is a vivid literary demonstration of what the CROWD network seeks to achieve organisationally. For the text will have sentences, passages and lines written next to each other and not hierarchically above, below, in front of or behind each other. Unrolling the scroll at every stop (marketplaces, hospitals, literature houses or public urban spaces) will enable it to be read in all directions. The aim is to open the workshop for the reader, to understand reading as a necessary part of writing, and to interrogate the certainties associated with the reception and production of literature, to try out a new kind of translation in which it is not the original that defines the process but in which all writers together work on a large, common, multi-lingual and polyphonic original text.

Europe – the treasure island
The text created on the journey will, aside from its tangible form as a scroll, be updated daily on the AGORA Internet platform and mobile app, where it can be followed and even years later bear testimony to the common experience of the tour. The original scroll, however, will be left in a watertight treasure chest in the Mediterranean Sea at the end of the bus tour. The key to the chest will subsequently be kept in Finland.
It is anticipated that the bus tour will be accompanied by a team of film producers, with whom we have been in constant contact since 2013. The TV channel 3Sat has also expressed great interest in the concept.