Laura Serkosalo from the Finnish non-profit literary organization Nuoren Voiman Liitto (NVL), partner of the CROWD, presents their projects and explains their part of the literary journey that will be our bus tour across Europe in 2016.
Laura Serkosalo from the Finnish non-profit literary organization Nuoren Voiman Liitto (NVL), partner of the CROWD, presents their projects and explains their part of the literary journey that will be our bus tour across Europe in 2016.
“The Independent Literary Scene of Berlin/ SOUNDOUT! Festival”
Moritz Malsch introducing the Lettrétage as one of its co-founders and talking about the Free Scene Coalition in Berlin and The SOUNDOUT!
Tom Bresemann’s Opening of the CROWD Conference.
Tom Bresemann, co-founder of the Lettrétage, talks about CROWD and details of the literary journey that will be our bus tour across Europe in 2016.
Andrea Inglese talking about his projects, amongst them the literary blog Nazione Indiana and the website GAMMM.
“Spread the Wor(l)ds!”
Ondrej Buddeus talks about literary activism in the Czech Republic.
Ondrej Buddeus explains what it means to be a literary activist.
“Orbita between the lines”
Inga Bodnarjuka explains the projects she’s involved with, mainly ORBITA.
Corina Bernic explains why we need the CROWD.
“Feasts of friends-festivals as ways of connecting and creating art”
Amanda DeMarco explains what’s positive about working in the literary field.
Amanda DeMarco talks about „New German Fiction“ and ‘Readux Books’.
I was properly excited to attend this unique conference of literary organisers and activists, hosted and led by the extraordinary Lettretage – Tom Bresemann, Katharina Deloglu, Moritz Malsch & co, in Berlin, precisely because, absurdly, it seemed wholly focused on the extremely niche thing that I have found myself doing in poetry – that is organisation, curation, innovation, but also something more fundamental than this – the two extensive days of discussion in a room in Kreuzberg were about action. and the possibilities of doing that across Europe, with ambition and energy, while maintaining consideration and ephemeral sensitivity to what literature might be, rather than what it should be.
Lettretage itself is cutting a path for things like the Enemies project. It is doing what I’ve often inadvertently found myself trying to do. This conference was the best possible example of this, having been around near a decade, Lettretage is now innovating ways to grow and centralise a network of similarly minded people and organisations. They have secured fantastic funding support from creative europe and many others to create a tour of Europe, through their CROWD project and to develop things like an app which will allow visitors to new cities to get ‘local’ information on readings and performances. Always their emphasis is on the ground up outfits, the artists and curators who are building up from communities and live, contemporary cultures of poetry, literature and performance arts. Rather than shutting up shop after their successes, they are aggressively searching out those who share their mission and their general attitude of openness and innovation.
I have waffled about so many theoretical notions that gel perfectly with their approach, it was genuinely gratifying and made me feel wholly at home visiting them. So I trotted out these ideas again in Berlin – people before poetry, process over product, respect in the world, disrespect in the text… The guerrilla nature of Enemies was brought into sharp focus here, how reactive I am, and how grounded Lettretage and the many other organisers here are in their worlds and communities. I realised London is different place to organise, in a sense wonderful and anonymous and incremental because of its sprawl. The participants here are more rooted, they take responsibility with deeper ties, and all the while they maintain these positions of giving space to mostly avant garde, or contemporary, work and supporting artists while reaching actual people with that work.
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SOURCE HERE
Friday, the 23rd of January and Saturday, the 24th of January, 8pm, free entrance
Lettrétage, Mehringdamm 61, 10961 Berlin
What fascinates us in texts? How do we make literature glow? When does the spark ignite? Quo vadis, world of language?
The self-starting network in the European independent literary scene CROWD invited exciting, impulse giving literary activists from the UK, Serbia, Italy, Latvia, Cyprus, Finland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Iceland to Berlin, to discuss all their different ideas of literature during a two day conference.
During the evening events CROWD will present the Berliner public texts of contemporary authors from all over Europe: Aesthetic fascination and political discussion potential make a diverse picture of contemporary European literature tangible. Texts that pulsate here and today in the truth of the present. Texts that show us why it is worth to formulate again and again literature as an invitation to discuss.
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 Ulrike Techert