April 8–9, 2016
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
D-10557 Berlin
A project of Ernst Schering Foundation and Haus der Kulturen der Welt
With Marcel Beyer, Lilian-Astrid Geese, Wolfgang Heiniger, Ernst Kausen, Dagmara Kraus, Terézia Mora, Olaf Nicolai, Günther Orth, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Cord Riechelmann, Klaus Sander, Frank D. Steinheimer, Anke te Heesen, Graham F. Valentine, Hanns Zischler and a film from Nora Gomringer.
Curated by Marcel Beyer
The curator and award winning author Marcel Beyer examines the connections, contradictions, and possibilities of the dynamics of Sprache und Wissen (Language and Knowledge): “Language creates order, while at the same time allowing us to enter into non-existent worlds.” On April 8 and 9, Sprache und Wissen (Language and Knowledge) will address the question of whether science can be “translated” into literature. Readings, performances, and talks will examine how language can function as a tool and mediator of self-understanding and knowledge of the world, how it enables us to manipulate real and imaginary things—and how language also plays its own game according to inscrutable rules.
However, what happens when one succumbs to the aesthetic allure of the factual? In which aesthetic and poetic, prosaic and narrative forms does our thinking express itself? These and other questions will be addressed by artists, scientists, translators, and interpreters beyond the established disciplinary boundaries.
Thus in Prompters of the Subtext, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, historian of science and molecular biologist, and Hanns Zischler, writer and actor, re-examine their translation of Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatologie after 45 years as “our German has improved.” In Structure, Pattern, Interference, the artist Olaf Nicolai and the composer Wolfgang Heiniger question the supposed “immediacy” of the visual arts and music, which unlike literature are not bound to language. The film My 4 LTRS from poet and sound performer Nora Gomringer brings order into the “Text of Life,” the decoded human genome. In Between Ear and Mouth, Terézia Mora, writer and translator, speaks with interpreters about the art of anticipating foreign trains of thought. The singer and actor Graham F. Valentine performs Georges Perec’s disquisition Cantatrix sopranica L. on the question of what happens when soprano singers are pelted with tomatoes during their performance. All events in German with simultaneous translation into English.
For full program, please go to the website.
Haus der Kulturen der Welt is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well as by the Federal Foreign Office.
Press contact: Anne Maier, T +49 30 39787 153, [email protected]
