Poetica 10 - »Making Room – Raum lassen« Lesungen und Gespräche mit Radna Fabias, Claudia Rankine und Sasha Marianna Salzmann

In the organizer's words:

"And where would the safest place be if the place has to be other than the body?" asks Claudia Rankine in her long poem Citizen, which explores the effects of racism on the soul, body and social textures in the USA. Perhaps this place is the poem. And perhaps it changes under the pressure of the conditions that need to be changed - transforming, as in Rankine's case, into textual spaces on the border between essay, critical intervention and autotheory.
The poems by Radna Fabias from the Netherlands also deal with bodies and resistance to the narrowing of social spaces through xenophobia. They create realities in which there is room for absolutely everyone, somewhere between impropriety and ascribed impropriety. An entire apartment block is shouldered with "436 Turks", "night porters", "cleaners" and "sleepless welfare recipients" - simply "because they fit on my back".
"Poetry, when it succeeds, weaves us together." What Sasha Marianna Salzmann said on the occasion of the Peace Prize for the Ukrainian poet Serhij Zhadan also applies to her own work. Salzmann's plays and novels are able to conjure up the interconnectedness of our destinies with the most haunting poetic affection. At the same time, they find that saving space in language that must remain unavailable, the poetic reservoir for our sense of possibility, our hopes.

Moderation: Uljana Wolf
The German translations will be read by Maddy Forst.
In cooperation with the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and the Literaturhaus Köln.

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The event will be held in German and English.
Admission 12/8/6 EUR
Tickets are available in advance at the Literaturhaus Köln and at the Box Office.