Wo kommen wir hin. Getting the Elephant Out of the Room
Kathrin Röggla in discussion with ...
... Heike Kleffner, a journalist and chief executive officer of the Association of Counseling Centres for Victims of Right-Wing, Racist and Anti-Semitic Violence in Germany (VBRG).
To carry out a literary experiment, Kathrin Röggla invites viewers to a series of talks from 21–25 May 2019, presented under the title Der Elefant aus dem Raum (Getting the Elephant Out of the Room). Her guests come from varied fields of political, legal and dramatic professions. She will speak with them about their work experiences in an attempt to determine whether problems in communication crop up on a par with the proverbial “Elephant in the Room”, and then she'll process this material live. Röggla uses the special features of the Akademie building on Hanseatenweg ‒ a venue that is a place of production, performance and artists' residences combined into one ‒ to delineate such sites in her performance.
In a series of talks meant to be publicly experienced, Röggla begins by holding a one-hour conversation with each respective visitor in the sound studio. At around 7 pm she moves to Hall 1, where she publicly transcribes the recorded conversation. And towards 8 pm the performance continues in the “Beckett Studio”, where Röggla extracts literary material from the transcript. During her performance Mark Lammert will carry out his work as a copyist and transformer of texts.
Heike Kleffner is a journalist and the chief executive officer of the Association of Counseling Centres for Victims of Right-Wing, Racist and Anti-Semitic Violence in Germany (VBRG). Since the 1990s she has written about neo-Nazi terror and the situation of minorities in society, particularly in East Germany. She is co-editor of the standard works Generation Hoyerswerda (2016), Unter Sachsen: Zwischen Wut und Willkommen (2017) and Rückhaltlose Aufklärung? NSU, NSA, BND ‒ Geheimdienste und Untersuchungsausschüsse zwischen Staatsversagen und Staatswohl (2019).
22 May: Arabelle Bernecker-Thiel, a political scientist and consultant for migration management
23 May: Ulf Bünermann, a sociologist and coordinator in the Berlin State Office for Equal Treatment and against Discrimination (LADS)
24 May: Frank Raddatz, a dramaturge and publicist
25 May: Patrick Kroker, a lawyer, affiliated with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR)
A special event that is part of “Wo kommen wir hin”.