Paul Celan, whose centenary was celebrated in 2020, is a crucial figure to scrutinize those tragedies, cracks and traumas that are imprinted on the collective body of humanity in the twentieth century. His multi-layered oeuvre is particularly suitable for investigating the question of the centrifugal forces to which the individual's identity construction is exposed, when self-attribution and the attribution by others prove to be both a blessing and a curse – forces that mutually stipulate and exclude each other in a productively restless and motivically irredeemable process.
Based on the poetics of selected poems of Celan, the dilemma of the circular structure of identity will be connected to theoretical impulses of the present, especially those, which see the actual strength in the refusal to rearrange the material, which follow the utopia of a "matter" that is taking on the role of the fluid, the role of the speaking as the radically undisposable.
One of the main ambitions of the project is to launch and to question such models of posthumanist imagination. Core and concept for this delivers Celan's poem "Anabasis'', which represents for the philosopher Alain Badiou a certain technique of being at home in uncharted territories, in the constitutively strange of the material of a landscape, in the self-disciplined restlessness. And further, how much confrontation can Donna Haraway's concept of the "compost-ability" of man ("We are humus not Homo") withstand, if it is actually connected to a commemorative culture that is strongly influenced by issues of identity, or if held over the actual grave edges of the destruction of the 20th century. Likewise, the utopian dispositions of these hybrid, unstable object worlds should be illuminated and are to be made fruitful for art (Dark Ecology, Speculative Realism).
10 artists will be selected for the project in equal proportions from Germany and Ukraine (relevant is the place of work and residence, not the nationality). The artists will receive a total grant of 800 EUR or an equivalent in UAH for the project phase including the production costs of their contributions. During the two-week residency phase in the second half of July, the artists are invited to participate in internal online events with selected guests. The artistic contributions will be published digitally and exclusively on the project site anabasis.space.
ANABASIS is organized by NGO "Ukrainian-German Cultural Society of Chernivtsi" at the Centre Gedankendach in partnership with Institute for German Culture and History of Southeastern Europe at LMU Munich (IKGS) and supported by the European Union under the House of Europe programme.
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