{"id":40881,"date":"2024-07-30T19:01:18","date_gmt":"2024-07-30T17:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/?p=40881"},"modified":"2025-09-19T16:18:32","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T14:18:32","slug":"unhiding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/unhiding\/","title":{"rendered":"Unhiding"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"project":[357],"project_type":[725,726,735,736],"class_list":["post-40881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","project-solitude-blog","project_type-formats","project_type-text","project_type-spheres-of-practice","project_type-textual"],"acf":{"bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","custom_color_css_variable":"","content_type":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"I stole a little time, a little space \u2013 ease is amiss; it is difficult to attain on the best of days, and those are long gone.\r\n\r\nThe novella is published now. I have turned pain into fiction, and it doesn't matter what else may or may not happen \u2013 I am at peace, although, again, ease is missing.\r\n\r\nI wonder about how pain transforms into fiction, whether it can ever truly be an act of making the real fictional, of setting aside what happened, reintegrating it.\r\n\r\nThere are two forms of writing: For one, I breathe life into characters that do not exist in this exact manner outside of my mind. For the other, I adjust what has happened into a beast of its own making.\r\n\r\nThis is what is commonly referred to as autofiction.\r\n\r\nThe act of writing, however, is never a singular act, but collaborative by nature. The comma errors in the first edition of the novella, one word that has been omitted \u2013 all of these errors are mine, but also that of editors and proofreaders who humoured me in my endeavour to write in English as well as German although the former is simply not native to them. So now there are some flaws in the text, minor to most, but glaringly obvious to me. These mistakes, however, are as collective in their making as the text itself, which I find comforting.\r\n\r\nThere is, in that sense, no such thing as autofiction, or the authorial. And yet the content, the movement of the novella is unmistakably mine.\r\n\r\nbell hooks once wrote, \u00bbI came to theory because I was hurting,\u00ab and I came to writing for much the same reason. This hooks quote is the starting point of Teresa Carmody\u2019s essay \u00bbOn Theory and Autofiction: Staking Genre,\u00ab published in the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em> in September 2021.\r\n\r\nIn it, Carmody writes that \u00bb[w]hile an \u203aI\u2039 may be constructed performatively within either genre, the respective contracts between the implied authors and their audiences are distinct in important ways. Where autotheory declares this is true<\/em>, autofiction suggests this may be true<\/em>.\u00ab\r\n\r\nThis may be true. When truth becomes conditional, what does that ultimately mean? We live in a post-truth society, and we as artists have contributed to the deconstruction of reality. Now we live in unreality or parallel realities \u2013 what is real to me may not be real to you and vice versa.\r\n\r\nIn Germany, it is easier for someone to assault a person and then accuse their accuser of defamation than to be held accountable for their actions. It does not matter what is true if what is true cannot be proven. The very nature of most instances of assault obfuscates the lived reality of assault survivors. So this may be true, but it does not matter. The reliability of the narrator is automatically called into question.\r\n\r\nAs Carmody writes with regard to the difference between autotheory and autofiction, \u00bb[I]t follows, then, that there are different ethical considerations for each genre, both in terms of the reliability of one\u2019s narrator and in the portrayal of the other \u203acharacters\u2039 referenced in a text.\u00ab\r\n\r\nThe question becomes how one can blur these lines, move those parts of autofiction which belong to the realm of reality from a \u00bbmay be true\u00ab to an \u00bbis true.\u00ab\r\n\r\nMy mind is a racing thing, my experience mirrored in a text I once had the pleasure of translating, Exposure<\/em> by Olivia Sudjic. Sudjic speaks of the fear of exposure, the inability to go back to the safety of being hidden, or to even remain safe behind the label of fiction, once non-male writers have been published.\r\n\r\nExposure in that sense is terrifying, but it can be freeing as well. Writing down trauma, making it visible, makes it undeniable. It exposes the person traumatised, but also exposes the people responsible for that trauma. Why else do we continue writing books and making movies about the worst humanity has to offer? We believe that this form of exposure will perhaps lead to the justice that courts and criminal justice systems so often deny victims of war, of violence, of abuse.\r\n\r\nOf course, this bears the danger of retraumatisation, but for artists it is perhaps a moral obligation to take any chance to right the wrongs of the world.\r\n\r\n\u00bbUse the discursive nature of text,\u00ab a friend and fellow writer once told me, \u00bbto make yourself heard.\u00ab\r\n\r\nTo turn a hidden truth into a visible one, an unsure \u00bbmaybe\u00ab into the reality that it is."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","bgcolor":"has-bg-grey","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"

Simon\u00e9 Goldschmidt-Lechner<\/span> (she\/they) is a Hamburg-based writer and interdisciplinary artist interested in queer online fandoms, (postmigrant) horror narratives, language in video games and linguistic experimentation in general. They have been writing since 2018, and their first novel, Messer, Zungen, was published in 2022. More recently, they have been involved in interdisciplinary projects combining literature and new music, featuring composers and musicians from Hamburg and Berlin.<\/p>"}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40881"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43577,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40881\/revisions\/43577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project?post=40881"},{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=40881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}