!!!DUE TO CLOUSRE OF GOETHE-INSTITUT IN EXILE THE EVENT IS MOVED TODIFFRAKT!!!
Goethe-Institut in Exile:|The Sea Is There, But We Are Not: Literature from Palestine
MI 25.2, 19.30H diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie e. V.
Address: Crellestraße 22, 10827 Berlin
ACUD MACHT NEU's team statement:
Yesterday, we were surprised by the news that the Goethe-Institut im Exil must close with immediate effect.
The event planned for tomorrow at ACUD Studio, ‘The Sea Is There, But We Are Not: Literature from Palestine,’ had to be cancelled, but fortunately it can still take place at diffrakt as an independent event. We would have liked to continue hosting it at ACUD Studio, but the decision was made by the curators.
For four years, Goethe Institute in Exile was part of Kunsthaus ACUD and was an extraordinary meeting place for people from countries that suppress dissenting political opinions.
Ironically, it now seems likely that the sudden closure is an act of political censorship on the part of the German Foreign Ministry, because the fundamental orientation of the Goethe Institute in Exile as a place for the culture and voice of the displaced does not fit into the reactionary worldview of this government. We condemn any form of censorship and suppression of freedom of expression by any government, but especially the German government, which, in times of ever-increasing global totalitarian tendencies, has the duty to defend these freedoms in accordance with the German constitution and not try to suppress them.
Info about the event:
This evening opens a space of resonance for three Palestinian authors who have recently arrived in Europe. Their work emerges from the tension between shrinking living spaces, forced displacement, and profound societal upheaval. Their writing transforms these experiences into language that speaks to the present, treating literature as a practice ofpresence, preservation, and resistance.
Curation of the evening and introductory text by Abdalrahman Alqalaq:
Recently fled from Gaza to Dublin and currently a guest writer at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, the author and translator Alaa Alqaisi explores, in poems and essays, the fractures of memory and language, showing how words probe the unspeakable, a poet who writes “as someone whose hands have sifted through broken glass for signs of life”.
At the same treshhold carries the London-based poet Asmaa Azaizeh a banished earth with in her body: The Meadow of Ibn Amir, and swallows that circle above her father’s olive groves, shielding them from the encroaching asphalt of gentrification.
Travelling from Brussels, the poet Ahmed Saleh tells, in his poems, how on a sunny day in Gaza a bicycle turned into “a stretcher for the dead”, sidewalks into “coffins”, and sea into “a graveyard”, and yet he insists on teaching his readers how, in Gaza, prisons and cells, weapons factories and curses can still be transformed into fields, gardens and songs.
How can one speak today of a “Palestinian literature” when, since 1948, it has emerged from dispossession, genocide, and disappearance, written from many places and yet about a single one? On this evening, the three Palestinian poets and authors read from their work and speak with literary critic Maha El Hissy about a literature whose body is torn apart, its limbs scattered between occupation and diaspora, and which persistently attempt stocon front, traverse, and resist this fragmented geography.
Musical intervention by Cham Saloum.
In cooperation with Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.
Accessibility:
ACUD has step-free access to both upper floors. Please contact us in advance at im-exil@goethe.de, or speak to a member of the Goethe-Institut in Exile team on-site, so that elevator access can be arranged.