Villa Aurora Events Archive
November 2023
Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra performs works by Cathy Milliken | California Festival
Los Angeles, Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Information
We have the pleasure to host a concert of compositions for voice and strings by our composer-in-residence Cathy Milliken as part of the California Festival. On Saturday, November 4th, at 4pm, the
About the Program
OCTOPUS CUTS 1-5, 2023
Cathy Milliken
CRIE, 2018
Cathy Milliken
OBJECTS, 2001/2023
Cathy Milliken
STRING QUARTET NO. 2
Arnold Schoenberg
Partners
In cooperation with the California Festival and the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra
Meet The Artists
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Participants
Anke Völk studied painting at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien and the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. Today she lives and works in Berlin. In her conceptual idea of an expanded painting Anke Völk explores the boundaries of the painting and expands them within the image, the image carrier, and the location where the painting takes place.
While in LA, Anke Völk is exploring image conditions in the sense of an expanded understanding of the image in her paintings. Her works aim at expanding genre boundaries in painting, a connection between painting and other media, which, in turn, always implies a questioning of the image. At Meet the Artists, she will give insights into her work on site.
Cathy Milliken is an award-winning composer performer and creative director. She is at home in many genres: chamber and orchestral music- film music, music theatre, installations and opera. She is also passionate about social music practice and has led and co- created many participatory musical interventions and works.
During her time at the Villa Aurora as fellow, Cathy Milliken is composing a string quartet for the renowned Arditti Quartett in order to celebrate their 40th Jubilee as well as to compose something that is unusual and perhaps even new for them. At Meet the Artists, she will share results of her search for new sounds and for the different possibilities of using voice alongside her instrumental writing for the quartet. She will also be showing other works of hers that are precursor works, experiments or experiences which in different ways essentially seek to embody instrument and voice.
Janine Eggert studied Visual Arts at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg and at Ar.Co, Çentro de Arte & Comunicaçao Visual, Lisbon. As an artist, she navigates between different media forms such as sculpture, installation, printmaking and video. Since 2005 she has worked both as a solo artist and as a duo together with Philipp Ricklefs. Eggert’s work has been exhibited internationally including in Zurich, New York, Miami, London and Valencia.
At Meet the Artists, Janine Eggert will present examples of her work and artistic approach and share insights into her ongoing image search for Googie architecture. Visitors can also view a recent video project of hers which cinematically and sonically transforms the Alpine landscape it seeks to explore.
Paula Fürstenberg grew up in Potsdam. After residing in France for two years, she studied at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel from 2008 to 2011. Today, she lives and writes in Berlin.
At the reception, Paula Fürstenberg will read passages from her upcoming novel Weltalltage (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, February 2024) in English translation and engage in conversation about the presented text as well as her current projects.
Politics and Fiction: Lion Feuchtwanger’s Oppermanns
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Information
Reading from the revised English translation of Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns by Joshua Cohen, followed by a discussion with Joshua Cohen and Andrea Grossman.
Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns narrates the fall of a prominent German Jewish family caused by the Nazis rise to power, chronicling historical events almost contemporaneously. It is also Feuchtwanger’s last work set in his own century. The Oppermanns will become a point of departure for a discussion about political arts which is often dismissed as propaganda, "but is in fact the only available corrective to the real and actual propaganda of entrenched power” (Joshua Cohen). Poignantly, the event will take place at Feuchtwanger’s exile residence in Pacific Palisades where he found refuge from Nazi prosecution and, again, became a target of government surveillance.
In cooperation with USC Libraries.
Read more about The Oppermanns
"A Classic Novel of the Nazis’ Rise That Holds Lessons for Today" by Joshua Cohen
"Ninety Years Ago, This Book Tried to Warn Us" by Pamela Paul
In connection with the Thomas Mann House Annual Conference “Arts in Times of Crisis. The Role of Artists in Weakened Democracies” November 18-19, 2023.
Participants
Joshua Cohen's books include the novels Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short-fiction collection Four New Messages, and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His most recent novel, The Netanyahus, won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in New York City.
Andrea Grossman is the founder and president of Writers Bloc, a nonprofit literary series now in its 28th season. Writers Bloc hosts thought leaders who have made a significant impact on our cultural landscape. The series has hosted artists, novelists, journalists, historians, social critics, and Members of Congress who engage with the reading public of Los Angeles. Andrea has a B.A. in English from UCLA and a Masters from the Annenberg School at USC.
Partners
In cooperation with USC Libraries.
Approaching Marta Feuchtwanger: Sonya Schönberger in Conversation with Marianne Heuwagen
Berlin
The installation “Marta” at the Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf in the Villa Oppenheim is a fascinating tribute to the life of Marta Feuchtwanger. During a three-month stay in Marta Feuchtwanger's room at Villa Aurora, Schönberger deeply immersed herself in Marta's world: she slept and worked in the same rooms, looked out of the same window, and saw herself in the same mirror.
In the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, she came across personal items of Marta's, which were stored in small, seemingly arbitrarily assembled boxes. Schönberger staged and documented these objects to gain a deeper insight into Marta's life and tell her story in a new, intimate way.
Accompanying her installation “Marta,” Villa Aurora alumna Sonya Schönberger holds a conversation with Marianne Heuwagen:
Marianne Heuwagen shares her personal memories of Marta Feuchtwanger, with whom her friendship began in the late 1970s. Heuwagen lived on the American West Coast since her university days, where she established herself as a journalist, reporting for the ARD broadcasting stations, DIE ZEIT, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. For NDR, Heuwagen conducted extensive interviews with Marta, which she compiled in the feature “Ein halbes Jahrhundert im Exil.” (“Half a century in exile”)
After returning to Germany in 1986 and Marta's death in 1987, Heuwagen dedicated herself to the preservation of Villa Aurora as a cultural monument of exile. As a founding member of the Friends of Villa Aurora and long-time board member of the association, she brings a deep understanding of Marta Feuchtwanger's legacy and her influence on the cultural landscape of Pacific Palisades.
We warmly invite you to discover the world of Marta Feuchtwanger through the eyes of two women who know her in different ways.
An exhibition of the Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf in the Villa Oppenheim