Literature as a European mother tongue: In our series “One is a CROWD”, we introduce you to authors from all over Europe who will be involved in the CROWD omnibus reading tour, taking place from May to July 2016, featuring 100 authors who will be travelling through 15 European countries. We asked them three questions about text production, reception and mediation. In case you were wondering what a literary activist in Vienna looks like, meet Barbi Markovic!

“To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” ( Roland Barthes) – Do you see yourself as an author and do you agree with this?

I always agree with Roland Barthes. Closing! Yes that is exactly what I do. I close and decide. I copy and organize and delete. I drink coffee and answer when somebody calls up an author. But that is normal. Closing is important.

Reading is writing is reading is writing …  – why, and if, how?

We are allowed to use anything in order to write what we want to read. Why not? Any way we can. For my first book I took an entire story of another author (Thomas Bernhard) and did a personal rewrite. For my second book, I copied down all the texts to be seen in the main squares in Berlin, Belgrade, Vienna, Graz, Sarajevo and Zagreb in order to get a genuine city-text and be able to compare and translate cities. It is material: you have to gather some text in order to write. You don’t have to, sorry – I got caught up in this tone.

Which literary event fascinated you most and why? (Please give a link to the website of the event)

Traumawien art club. They are really crazy. Last time I went there, they gave us a lecture on how to buy drugs in the deep, dark and moist web with bitcoin. It’s a literary rave. Also there was this guy, whose chat-bots got into a fight in a second life. Very cool.