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.

Echo. Echo: Indigenous Voices

The first edition of the Echo. Echo series — a cooperation between the international literature festival berlin (ilb) and the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities” — was launched in 2021 with a focus on Indigenous Voices. Through readings and discussions, the series explored constellations of resonance and polyphony in texts by Indigenous authors from diverse contexts, addressing the politics of the body, land, and language reflected in these literatures.

What knowledge counts? Who owns the land? And who is heard? For too long, Indigenous authors have been erased from literary history and remained largely unacknowledged in the publishing industry. This is now beginning to change, thanks to the artistic and activist work of Indigenous writers and the cultural infrastructures they create. Their works resist marginalization and linguistic erasure. They speak of alternative forms of knowledge, structural violence, land theft, and the ongoing consequences of colonization and neo-colonialism.

Engaging with the novels, poems, and essays of Billy-Ray Belcourt, Natalie Diaz, and Toni Jensen, it becomes clear that “Indigenous literature” operates simultaneously on local and global levels, negotiating community-building in diverse ways. By combining multiple textual forms and artistic traditions, this literature creates an echo chamber of historical and contemporary experience, transgenerational trauma, and aesthetic resistance.

In readings and conversations, the invited authors shared insights into their artistic practices and reflected on the complexities of cultural identity, literary self-assertion, and the ambivalence of writing in the colonizer’s language. They made echo perceptible as both a phenomenon of resistance and a figure of transcultural and transtemporal interconnectedness.

Concept & curation: Sima Ehrentraut (EXC 2020) & Simone Schröder (ilb)
Curatorial consultant: Lindsey Drury

Echo. Echo is an ongoing event series conceived in conjunction with the international literature festival berlin. It understands literature as a polyphonic, inherently diverse echo chamber. What voices—beyond that of the author—resound in a poem, a novel, or a fragment? What echoes of textual traditions and narrative forms can be discerned within them? The series is devoted to the preceding, suppressed, contradictory, and simultaneous voices that inhabit literary texts.