Atelier Gegenwartserde #1

In December, the Centre for Literature (CfL) and the Literary Colloquium Berlin (LCB) are launching a series of digital events. At the centre of the collaboration is an ever-expanding digital studio designed by authors. The regular studio tours are characterised by a dialogue between the authors and a guest invited by them. Julia Rüegger kicks things off: in the VOOO studio, the Swiss poet explores various aspects of the Anthropocene and possibilities of being connected in the face of profound destruction in dialogue with other authors and artists. She asks how the ‘chronophobia’ diagnosed by geologist Marcia Bjornerud manifests itself in our perception of time, which ‘anthropocene toys’ (Dipesh Chakrabarty) we played with as children and are turning over the earth as adults, what poetic potential lies in words such as ‘faunal cut’ and what a reading circle with animals and other critics might look like. To this end, voice messages, encyclopaedia entries and poem (fragments) are sent back and forth, sonic approximations of a dinosaur's birdcall are attempted and thread games are woven, through which a 3D dinosaur smurf occasionally strolls.
The series of events relates to the GegenwartsErde network of the same name. The GegenwartsErde network is the idea of a collaborative focus on the current changes to the earth in the wake of climate change, extractivism and digitalisation, and on our (unequal) entanglements in it. According to the poet and theorist Daniel Falb (Geospekulationen. Metaphysik für die Erde im Anthropozän, Merve 2019), the concept of GegenwartsErde problematises the fact that the one present of the Earth is not always already given. The GegenwartsErde network knows that the presence of the contemporary arts has a signature that is just as complex as the planet itself. It aims to provide a space for artistic and activist positions that deal with this planetary complexity.