BLUTBUCH

In the organizer's words:

based on the novel by Kim de l'Horizon

What is this: Me? Where does it begin, where does it end? The narrator Kim feels alienated in her body in the face of a world that demands clear categorizations and strictly divides people into two categories: male or female. But what about everyone who doesn't fit into these schemes? The narrator tries to fill the void in her midst with excessive sex. When her grandmother, who is suffering from dementia, threatens to sink into oblivion, Kim sets off in search of clues deep into the past of her own family history. A wildly proliferating root system of memories comes to light. It is about the love-hate relationship with her grandmother, the difficult relationship with her mother, shame, traumas, longings, taboos and childhood monsters. In circular search movements, Kim unearths the repressed, forgotten and forbidden and comes across recurring forms of male violence and oppression. In this process, a new, fragile, fluid self emerges - a self that is not defined by patterns of patriarchal masculinity, but is able to melt down boundaries and connect what has been separated.

Kim de L'Horizon's furious novel, which was awarded the German and Swiss Literature Prize, is a relentlessly radical self-questioning, a poetic, physical, intoxicatingly magical and sensitive examination of her own roots and the prevailing power relations. The term "identity", which is so controversial and hotly debated today, appears here in a special light - dazzlingly refracted as if through a prism.