EXC 2020 Temporal Communities

"Reading", Hélène Cixous states, "is a provocation, a rebellion": it is "eating the forbidden fruit, making forbidden love, changing eras, changing families". Proceeding from contemporary literature, the project focuses the act of reading as an aesthetic and potentially political practice of building communities across space and time.

Against the backdrop of the so-called archival turn, writers make use of documentary methods and materials to construct literary explorations that traverse artistic languages and function as political interventions. This project examines the activation of archives in relation to expanded writing practices in Latin America.

How do the reflection and adaptation of avant-garde concepts of translation inform current digital language art? Rooted in modernism studies, the project examines the complex relationship of twentieth-century literary practices and present day intermedial approaches.

The research project is dedicated to an investigation of literary writing practices of contemporary artists (from the 1960s to today). It examines how visual artists define their own literary practice as a core element of their art production and exhibition practices.

When the medial presence of writing is extended to sound, image or movement, the aesthetic autonomy of literary performances is brought into sharper focus. Connected with these changing formats of literary presentations are questions of the mediality of the literary event and its contexts.