ilb 2021 | Echo. Echo. Indigenous Voices
2021 sees the cooperation between the Cluster and the international literature festival berlin entering its third year. This September, we will be shaping the festival's focus on Indigenous Voices and launching the series Echo. Echo with this thematic focus, which will then continue to provide a framework for ongoing collaboration with the ilb.
Conceiving of literature as a polyphonic, inherently diverse echo chamber, Echo. Echo is a series of events planned in conjunction with the international literature festival berlin, which will take place at the festival over several years. What voices — other than that of the author — can be heard in a poem, a novel, or a text fragment? What echoes of textual traditions and narrative forms is it possible to discern in these works? The series is interested in the preceding, suppressed, contradictory, and simultaneous voices contained in literary texts.
And, in direct exchange with the participants, it makes echo perceptible as a phenomenon of resistance and a figure of transcultural and transtemporal interconnectedness.
The first edition in 2021 will focus on »Indigenous Voices«: Over a course of readings and discussions, the series will explore constellations of resonance and harmony in indigenous literatures and discuss with authors the elevation of voices, the politic of the body, and linguistic echo chambers.
What knowledge counts? Who owns the land? And who is heard? For a long time, Indigenous authors have remained largely unacknowledged in literary history and in the literary industry. This is gradually changing thanks to the artistic and activist work of Indigenous authors and the structures they create. In their works, they resist marginalization and linguistic extinction. They tell of alternative knowledge formation, structural violence, land theft, and the complex consequences of European colonization. In the novels, poems, and essays of Billy-Ray Belcourt, Natalie Diaz, and Louise Erdrich, for example, it becomes apparent that »Indigenous literature« operates in both a local and global register and negotiates the dynamics of community building in many ways. Combining various textual forms and artistic traditions, this literature forms an echo chamber of historical experience, transgenerational trauma, and aesthetic resistance.
In readings and talks, the authors will provide insights into their artistic production and discuss the complexity of cultural identity and literary self-assertion
Programme
Jainal Amambing: The Magic Buffalo
Daniela Catrileo & Toni Jensen: Voices of Communities - Politics in Indigenous Literature
Billy-Ray Belcourt & Tony Jensen: Body Memories
Louise Erdrich: The Night Watchman
Poetry Night