Organised by Susanne Klengel, project Border Temporalities and/in Literature, Research Area 1: "Competing Communities" in cooperation with the Institute of Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. This event is part of the lecture series "Border Temporalities: Doing Literature in a World of Walls".

Speaker: Susanne Klengel (Freie Universität Berlin/EXC 2020)

Dies und Das was a completely informal magazine of late surrealism created by African-American jazz poet, artist and surrealist Ted Joans in West Berlin and published in a single issue in 1984. This veritable work of art, at the same time precarious in its making, reflects on divided Berlin alongside issues of Black cultures, feminism, bestiaries and, of course, surrealism. Ted Joans is concerned in his magazine with playful but efficient forms of overcoming a multitude of social walls through subversive aesthetic means. For the artist, the Berlin Wall forms a surreal setting that he systematically incorporates into his magazine.

Susanne Klengel is professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She is a member of the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities. Doing Literature in a Global Perspective" as well as of the International Graduate College "Temporalities of Future in Latin America" and the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (Mecila). Her research interests include historical avant-garde movements, memoria and literature, South/South literary and cultural relations between Latin America and India, and Berlin as a site of Latin American literatures. In 2023 she published 'Dies und Das'. Black Surrealism from Berlin, 1984.