Tidalectics Reading #3

Routes and Roots

October 4, 2017

Tidalectics

TBA21–Academy

Programming

Tidalectics Reading #3 – Routes and Roots – Reading with actress Alina Ilonka Hagenschulte, Max Reinhardt Seminar. Discussing identity, narration and the possibility for poetic imagination.

Texts by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and Derek Walcott.

In his nearly 400 page long epic poem Omeros, the St. Lucia born poet and Nobel prize laureate Derek Walcott accomplishes an astounding poetic and narrative feat. Written in a style close to antique hexameter, Omeros reveals to be inspired equally by Walcott’s desire to give voice to the colorful abundance, the vibrant vitality of his home island of St. Lucia and by his love for language - for the tropes, protagonists and lyrical structures of the antique epics Illiad and Odyssey. Setting the classic struggle of Achilles, Hector and Helena to unravel within a fishing community on his home island of St. Lucia, the themes and tropes of the epics become part of Walcott’s very own contemporary- and vice versa. The text collapses predominant notions of history, topology and belonging. It becomes a maelstrom, that transgresses time, human agency and any clear notion of beginning an end.

Taking directions from postcolonial literature critic Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Tidalectics Reading#3 – Routes and Roots inquires the close connection between narration and identity. With fragmentation and displacement forming intrinsic characteristics of postcolonial diaspora communities (and with both operating diametral to the seeming continuity underlaying national or ethnic fictions): How does one narrate the roots of routed people?

This event forms the third iteration in a series of readings hosted by TBA21–Augarten in relation to the exhibition Tidalectics, currently on view until November 19, 2017. Tidalectics proposes a renegotiation of our manifold relations with the oceans, be they real and/or imaginary, by developing a perspective from within that can be experienced through the artworks working with metaphor, rhythm, narration, and regarding the texts through historic contingencies.

The reading will be held in German.

LOCATION

TBA21–Augarten, KIOSK
Scherzergasse 1a, 1020 Vienna

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