WHERE WERE WE – Art Writing Festival

This grand international festival reflects the murky world of words and visual arts, voices and voids, poetry and plastik, presence and performance, sounds and scholarly endeavours. Over five days and nights in early December, local and international audiences are invited to take part in a rich programme of readings, interpretations, concerts, conversations, interventions, crossovers, collective recitation and lectures, all on the large black box stage in the former rail freight yard Godsbanen, now a centre for cultural production.

WHERE WERE WE is an attempt to focus on a moment of confusion, a pause to consider where the line of speech – or writing, thinking, remembering – is now heading. A saying, a phrase that spans the lost, intimate inner monologue (where was I?) and a collective context, memory or social body (where were we?). From this central theme of translation and illusory dichotomies between the inner and the outer, the festival questions the intimacy of writing versus voicing as an immediately public, collective function.

Forty-seven renowned artists, writers, performers, conductors, and scholars working in a field of words and voice, objects and space, sounds, silence and interference – commentary functioning as poetry, facts becoming cast objects and conductors shaping collective utterances – ponder these issues and widen the festival programme, which includes:

Gerry Bibby (DE/AU), Kate Briggs (UK), Olivier Brossard (FR), Vincent Broqua (FR), Gerard Byrne (IR), Chana Dischereit (DE), Esther Dischereit (DE), Adam Drewes (DK), Patrick Farmer (UK), Andreas Führer (DK), Guattari Reading Circle (DK), Jennifer Hodgson (UK), Jen Hofer (US), Will Holder (UK), Andreas Vermehren-Holm (DK), Franziska Hoppe (DK), Dominique Hurth (FR), Ipek Ipekciolu (DE), Naja Lee Jensen (DK), Nora Joung (NO), Line Kallmayer (DK), Ray Kaczynski (US), Angie Keefer (US), Signe Lidén (NO), Holly Handman-Lopez (US), MonoMono (SE), Aislinn McNamara (IR), Fredrik Nyberg (SE), Christian Patracchini (IT), Rasmus Brink Pedersen (DK), Ditte Lyngkær Pedersen (DK), Marjorie Perloff (US), Cia Rinne (FI), Steve Roden (US), Roger Von Reybekiel (SE), Lytle Shaw (US), Lise Skou (DK), Morten Søndergaard (DK), David Toop (UK), Valerio Tricoli (IT), Ida Marie Hede (DK) & Miranda Trimmier (US), Alex Waterman (US), James Wilkes (UK).

The festival programme has been devised by Daniela Cascella (IT/UK), Rhea Dall (DK/DE) and Martin Glaz Serup (DK), both in collaboration and as individual programme strands, respectively titled Inner Voices: Translation, Transmission, Interference; The Social Body Sounding; Where’s the Body.

Wherewerewe Website