Gabriela Wiener: unentdeckt

What traces does colonial violence leave behind?

"A great-great-grandfather is little more than a trace in a lifetime, unless he took a paltry four thousand pre-Columbian objects with him to Europe. And if his greatest achievement is not to have discovered Machu Picchu, but almost." - Gabriela Wiener's provocative autobiographical novel is an intimate story from the family archive, which is also the story of an entire continent.

The sacred places in the Andes once housed valuable burial objects. Today they can be found in the great collections of European museums. There, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her heritage: Her great-great-grandfather Charles Wiener, of all people, a Jewish-Austrian explorer, captured thousands of artifacts in the 19th century. As she traces the paternal line of her family tree, she comes across patriarchal heroic tales: the legend of the humble German teacher who becomes Indiana Jones overnight, but leaves his wife and child behind in Peru. And her father's parallel relationship, in which he liked to wear an eye patch. Are ideas of love and lust being passed on? - Based on her surname, Gabriela Wiener not only becomes a chronicler of colonial crimes, but also a narrator of herself.

"Perhaps the most courageous voice of the new literary generation of Latin American women. She has explored virtually every thorny issue facing contemporary society." - The New York Times

Gabriela Wiener, born in Lima in 1975, is a Peruvian writer and journalist. Her books include "Nueve lunas", a memoir about pregnancy, and "Sexografías", a collection of essays about contemporary sex culture. Wiener was awarded the Peruvian National Journalism Prize for a report on violence against women. Her autobiographical novel "UNENTDECKT" was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024 and has been translated into 8 languages.

The event is organized in cooperation with the seminar of the TU Dortmund University