Lesen am See
Friday, July 14th at 6pm
Where is the Love, Maybe we Should Take it to the Street*
with Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Hubert Gromny, Kelly Krugman, Mokia Laisin, Lia Milanesio.
Address: Strandbad Tegelsee/Zentrum für Kultur und Erholung
Schwarzer Weg 95, 13505 Berlin
Hosted by: Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit and Moabit Mountain College
(the event is held in English)
Through this reading session we want to invite you to a communality of sense-making through reflections on intimacy, softness, and the comradeship of love. We will give love words by evoking fragments from writings of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Alexandra Kollontai, adrienne maree brown and more — editing texts with gasps of awe, stings of lingering pain, and heartbeats committed to the rhythms of justice.
Too often systematic abuse is insisted to be an expression of love and allegiance. Too many have been told that their economy, society, and family need their pain to exist. Who is benefitting or harmed from such a proclaimed allegiance that serves the function of loving a selected few in governance or in power, or of one above another, all in the name of ‚love‘? How can we attune to listening to the wounds of such a love, and hear within them the possibilities of refusal and restoration? We will read together while trusting in our capacities of joy, of generative love and eros, and of intimacy: as creative forces grounded in deep sensual wisdoms of the body’s knowledge. We will accompany each other in witnessing how our body’s cells quietly and slowly respond to the sounds of words given to, and invoking, the complexities of love.
Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Hubert Gromny, Kelly Krugman, Mokia Laisin, Lia Milanesio.
*title uses phrases from: ‘Where is the Love’ Black Eyed Peas listen and ‘Found’ Tems ft. Brent Fayiaz listen)
In the frame of the cycle Lesen am See we would like to invite diverse reading groups and collectives to share their practices, related to the dialogical nature of text itself as well the community of readers & listeners. The cycle is curated by Agnieszka Kilian.
Lesen am See is a part of the two-year collaborative project Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses, Tools and Alliances conceived in collaboration with WHW, Zagreb, the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, and Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit, Berlin.
The program is co-funded by the European Commission’s Creative Europe program and Foundation Between Bridges.
Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock is a curator and researcher at SAVVY Contemporary and is part of the participatory archive project Colonial Neighbours. She received her MA in Postcolonial Cultures and Global Policy at Goldsmiths University of London and moved to Berlin in 2013. In her work within the permanent collection of SAVVY Contemporary she looks for colonial traces that are manifested in our present. The collaborative archive dedicates itself to discussing silenced histories and to the decanonization of the Western gaze through objects and the stories behind them.
Hubert Gromny is an artist, curator and researcher at SAVVY Contemporary currently working on developing artistic program dedicated to the neighbourhood of Wedding. He received MA in Art Praxis from Dutch Art Institute, MA in Graphic Art from Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow and BA in philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Recently he co-curated (with Renan Laru-an and Mokia Laisin) Jean-Ulrick Désert’s monographic exhibition “Conspicous Invisibility” at SAVVY Contemporary.
Kelly Krugman is a Mexican–American curator, editor, and project coordinator at SAVVY Contemporary. She holds a degree from Amherst College where her focus was on Comparative Literature, Fine Arts, and Performance Studies. She was a collaborating curator of ECOLOGIES OF DARKNESS (2018-2019), a project exploring intersectional feminist alliances and poetic figurations of queer pasts, presents, and futures, and then later: ULTRASANITY. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry, and Resistance (2019) and RAUPENIMMERSATTISM (2020), to name a few.
Mokia Laisin is an editor and curator at SAVVY Contemporary. His practice is concerned with exploring and relativising African and Latin American political economic writing emanating from the anti-colonial literary canon of the 20th century. He employs a class-conscious approach to his study of the demystifying potential of writing in its many forms.
Lia Milanesio is a Master graduate from Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Italy and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, with a dissertation analyzing the colonial impact on the Central African Republic through the five animal novels of René Maran. In 2020, she published in the post-colonial online journal “Il Tolomeo” the article “Environmental criticism in René Maran’s animal novels”, where she analyzed the ecological brutality of colonialism. She is now managing and co-curating the project “On damp earth we wander”, a concept by Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, along with Bilger Emir.