Donnerstag

Today, the day this preface is being written, elections are taking place in Belarus. One of the world’s longest-serving dictators is deploying all the forces of manipulation and suppression to legitimise himself through a seemingly democratic election. Against the last sham election in the summer of 2020, hundreds of thousands protested. The state’s response was brutal and thorough, silencing the country. Our colleague and friend, Maria Kalesnikava, an icon of the Belarusian democracy movement, which now largely operates from abroad, is one of the country’s most prominent political prisoners. In her honour, and because the events in Eastern Europe are so directly linked to our political reality, we offer a platform to artists in exile from Belarus and other countries ruled by autocracies–and more than that, we fight for their art to not only receive solidarity-based attention but also genuine recognition and integration into our art system.

 

The Belarusian poet Vera Burlak left her homeland with her family just over a year ago, due to the threat of arrest. Her son, Kastuś, who has autism, had received important support in Minsk, which now has to be painstakingly rebuilt in exile–in a foreign language. To learn how to express his feelings: Vera describes in this booklet, and in the comic book that will be released as part of the project, poignantly what this means in the face of a manipulative, post-Soviet education system that trains children to conform. Together with Kastuś, a highly gifted artist, she invented the ABC of Exclamations, where each of the 34 letters of the Belarusian alphabet is transformed into an exclamation and a corresponding narrative. The animator Monika Nuber brings the comics to life, and Georgia Koumará embeds everything into a spatial sound narrative. The performance is on view from today until Saturday in P1–don’t miss it! I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Philipp Haußmann and the Klett Group for their generous support of this project!

 

The concert of the SWR Symphony Orchestra opens, in many ways, utopian spaces. Johannes Maria Staud passionately describes the possibilities of music, which »cannot be instrumentalised or corrupted and can show reality–indeed, also as a model for politics and society–as it really is: vibrating, oscillating, flickering, trembling, quivering. Iridescent and multifaceted in the richness of the possible spaces of meaning…« Lydia Jeschke, the curator of the two concerts that the SWR has kindly included in the festival, writes about the concert: »In the sounds of an orchestra, much is possible, and there are hardly any limits to the musical correspondences. The composers of this year’s orchestral concert of the SWR NowMusic are particularly interested in the in-between notes: between events and also between the real, existing and the imagined. As Elena Mendoza writes, in the experience of wars and crises, one must not give up the search, the question of another reality.«

 

Sarah Nemtsov explores Jewish mysticism in her cycle SEPHIROT and the Kabbalistic concept of the Tree of Life, which connects the divine forces that make us who we are. She has written the pieces for the soloists of the Musikfabrik and guitarist Yaron Deutsch, whose abilities and passion for challenges she knows well, and in whose hands her powerful music finds a secure place.

 

Christine Fischer