Dorothea Schlegel Artist-in-Residence

Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"

May–July 2025

LESESTÜCK ("Reading Piece")

Heike Geißler’s work is concerned with modes of producing immediacy, questions of accessibility, low-threshold distribution and with the impossibility of not reading. At the Cluster, she will explore reading as a practice of an inner change in location. Her main research questions are as follows: Where are we while we read? Can this place be conceived, described and defended? Can it be created or activated in public space? How can a text be distributed or positioned in public space so as not to immediately interest a certain audience and repel another yet remain individually comprehensible – regardless of the fact that it is directed at everyone through its placement? The particular kind of text that Geißler is interested in generates not an act of consumption, but an engagement. It is not an expression of opinion but communicates in the space of possibility arising between the person reading and the text.

During her Fellowship, Geißler will develop a participatory format of reading, a ‘reading piece’ (‘LESESTÜCK’): a lecture performance, a play to be read to and by the audience, a text installation. Based on different media, materialities and reading settings, the piece aims at activating different modes and practices of quiet and loud, intimate and public, individual and communal reading. LESESTÜCK will be performed in the basement of the Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus and premieres on 30 October 2025.

Heike Geißler (*1977 in Riesa) has held guest lectureships in Kassel, Vienna and Leipzig, among others; in addition to her books, radio plays and stage plays, she has collaboratively developed film essays, audio walks, exhibitions, performances and installations in public spaces. All of her works focus on literature as a highly intermedial and performative phenomenon that is simultaneously synchronized in time and diachronically integrated, which is only effective as a collective aesthetic and social practice. Geißler is the award-winning co-founder of the intervention format Sabotique. She works with the actress Charlotte Puder as the collective George Bele. Her most recent essays Verzweiflungen (Suhrkamp) and Arbeiten (Hanser Berlin) were published in spring 2025. She lives in Leipzig.