Dear friends,
Since January 2014, the European Society of Authors (Paris / Berlin) and Mittel-Europa (art space for a migrant Europe : Bruxelles / Berlin)
have been working on a new program called SECESSION.
From the birth of the Society in 2008, our project has been to contribute to a politics and poetics of forms for the 21st century: to shift the question of language to the in-between of languages, to the non-place (the linguistic u-topos) where translation takes place. The in-between of languages (l’entre-des-langues / zwischensprachligkeit) led us to redefine the author as a link, as a society (an author and his translators) and no longer only as a “solitude.” The in-between of languages, as a language, is also a way of designating the community of readers around an author as a community above and beyond the territories of language. This conception of the poetic link in the respect of AND in the movements of bodies and territories (migration, hybridization, translation) and their political repercussions (surpassing the identities of suffering, getting beyond closed subjectivity) are taken further in this third program we are glad to inaugurate today.
SECESSION is an itinerant, curatorial, project with literary, philosophical, and artistic dimensions.
SECESSION is of course a reference to a certain period in Viennese modernity. But more than that, it is the whole Mittel-European space – a space without a hollow, an empty center – that underpins the SECESSION project. What we would like to do is to take hold of Europe as an object, using art, literature, and philosophy, in order to shift and rethink the idea of a European commonground. Doing so to create an attachment to multiplicity, to “in-between-s”, and a breach in the kidnapped conceptions and representations of the European Union and its nations.
SECESSION’s first events will take place in September-October of this year in Berlin. There will be two parts:
1. A month-long exhibition at the Institut Français in Berlin. “Maps of the SECESSION” with art works and maps by Anri Sala, Kader Attia, Álvaro Martínez Alonso, Julie Bena, Famed, Hackitectura, Simona Koch, Nicolas Maigret, Migreurop, Cédric Parizot, Marco Pezzotta, Philippe Rekacewicz, Stéphane Rosière, ChTo, Watch the Med.
With the participation of Isabelle Arvers, Institut Marc Bloch, Mittel-Europa (art space for a migrant Europe). A vernissage will be held on September 16, and regular meetings with the artists and scholars are planned.
2. An evening of readings and performances, September 23, starting from a fiction: a European “ghost people” has overthrown the old institutions of its continent. With contributions from Dorian Astor, Andrea Bajani, Patrick Boucheron, Alida Bremer, Christos Chrissopoulos, Marie Cosnay, François Cusset, György Dragomán, Mathias Énard, Juan Francisco Ferré, Srećko Horvat, Maylis de Kerangal, Yannis Kiourtsakis, Martin Pollack, Emmanuel Ruben, Joy Sorman, Robert Salais, Adam Thirlwell, Katharina Tiwald, Camille de Toledo, CécileWajsbrot, Karolina Wigura.
These texts will constitute the beginning of the SECESSION archives. The evening will take place on September 23 in Berlin at the Heimathafen in Neukölln. Stage design is by Leyla Rabih.
These two events have been conceived and supported in collaboration with Allianz Kultur Stiftung, le Centre Marc Bloch, l’Institut Français de Berlin.