Photo: Maurice Weiss / OSTKREUZ
A membrane is as delicate as it is unobtrusive: A thin skin which is permeable for liquids and gases. Literaturhaus Stuttgart, Institut français and Akademie Schloss Solitude put the image and idea of the membrane centre stage by inviting you to a four-day international literature festival »Membrane – African Literatures and Ideas« assembles more than 30 international writers, journalists, academics and media artists, bringing them together with the Stuttgart audience. Deploying this image of porosity, we put the spotlight on literatures little known in Stuttgart. We will discuss and interrogate the notion and the space of Africa and we want to render encrusted perceptions and ascriptions porous in the best sense of the word.
The three Stuttgart institutions set the frame for questions concerning our present and our future: Which visions of our being human together and living on a local, regional and global scale can we call forth without ignoring a history etched with violence and oppression. What insights of an encompassing future might these literatures provoke?
The festival programme features readings, conversations, interventions, lectures, culinary surprises and trajectories, publications on the Schlosspost online platform, exhibitions, performances, concerts and a German-Cameroonian conversation in comics.
The joint curators of the festival are: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya), novelist and currently Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard (Germany), director of EOTO, and economist, author and scholar Felwine Sarr (Senegal).
Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Heinrich Böll Foundation of Baden-Wuerttemberg.