Reading List # 112
An entirely subjective list of things happening in Berlin
February 9
Elias Hirschl »Schleifen«
The author Elias Hirschl talks with journalist Miriam Zeh about fact and fiction, speaking and silence.
Franziska Denk grows up in the milieu of the Vienna Circle and, as a child, suffers from a strange illness: every symptom she hears or reads about immediately manifests in her own body. In Otto Mandl, a brilliant mathematician, the young Franziska finds a kindred spirit. She learns to immunise herself against her condition by using words from dead languages. Together, the two develop an absolute obsession with language and jointly search for the perfect language.
What can be said—and what cannot? How can language grasp the present and the past? What can be spoken about, and what must remain unspoken because language has reached its limits?
Schleifen tells nothing less than the story of the power and influence of language on our lives—of what we are able to say and of what we are forced to invent.
(DE)
7 pm | Vagantenbühne, Kantstraße 12A
February 12
The Drama Is Present: Haare
Book launch with the author and ensemble, moderated by Anna-Katharina Müller.
She is an actor in her early sixties when she suddenly starts losing her hair in tufts. This is, she realizes, decay setting in; time is the killer. Or is she suffering from a sickness? As she gets pushed out of the theatre business, she purloins the wig she wore on stage from the make-up department and has it DNA-tested. It’s the start of a journey through the history of the origins and traditions of the wig – a history of vanity, theft, violence, and power imbalances.
In her play Haare/Hair, Manuela Infante, one of the most exciting theatremakers in South America, investigates how much we really want to know about the entanglements of global trade. Infante deftly zooms in on the reality of a cultural-historical niche that is intricately linked with notions of beauty, aging, and illness. Manuela Infante writes – poetically, philosophically and with striking sense for imagery – a polyphonic monologue around a collective snarl that is finally raising its voice.
(EN/DE)
8 pm | Volksbühne, Linienstraße 227
February 13
Performance: Swimming Pool Reflections, with Museum of No Art and Mitko Mitkov
Swimming Pool Reflections isn’t about swimming. It’s about standing at the edge and watching - the way light fractures through water, how shadows play across tile, everything that forms and dissolves in the viewer’s eye. The libretto moves through straits where bodies of water collide, small lakes with white slides, pools suspended in generic landscapes generated from uploaded photographs. Binary gods and transparent shadows. Sediment and cosmic hands weaving existence on overdimensional looms.
Mona Steinwidder, also known as Museum of No Art, and Mitko Mitkov have spent years exchanging sounds and words across Hamburg’s creative landscape - Swimming Pool Reflections is where those exchanges accumulated in Steinwidder’s studio beneath the slanted roof of a former barracks.
Premiered in November 2024 for Hamburg based artist Gesa Troch’s exhibition “you say water is sweet” at Hinterconti art space, the work intertwines Mitkov’s texts (originally composed as emails to members of a swimming club, as imaginary as they are real) with Steinwidder’s clarinet and synthesizer, full of dubby resonance.
(EN)
7 pm | Zabriskie, Reichenberger Str. 150
February 13 - 15
Manual for an Unsettled World
Closing program for Unsettled Earth at Spore.
This closing program extends Unsettled Earth’s year-long inquiry into practices and forms of organizing that unsettle the space-time of the colony and contest the systemic foreclosure of liberatory futures. It brings together experiments in agrarian autonomy across Palestine and the region, aesthetic strategies that rehearse anticolonial worldmaking and counter-histories of infrastructure and technology as terrains of struggle. Across these sites, the program attends to how collective political life is imagined, defended and sustained amidst the colonial fragmentation of land, bodies and psyches.
Through workshops, lectures, readings and performances, Manual for an Unsettled World insists on refusal as a material practice - one that cultivates insurgent subjectivities and reorders social relations. As a closing gesture of Unsettled Earth, the program does not offer resolution, but sharpens a shared horizon of struggle that moves against colonial permanence, engineered scarcity and the systematic dismantling of native life-worlds.
There will also be a mutual aid kitchen supporting the Gaza-based food sovereignty initiative Thamra.
(EN)
from 2.30 pm | Spore, Hermannstraße 86