Villa Aurora Events Archive
2024
Feuchtwanger Refreshed 2024
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Information
FEUCHTWANGER REFRESHED 2024
Eight graduate writers from USC's School of Dramatic Arts MFA dramatic writing program will be presenting short plays inspired by and in dialogue with Lion Feuchtwanger's essay "The Working Problems of the Writer in Exile." Actors Michael Khachanov, Mehrnaz Mohammadi, and Arye Gross will play the roles as these new short plays examine how the artist and their work survive being torn from their roots and whether it is possible to transplant one's life and art – and live again. With Oliver Jai’Sen Mayer, writer, professor, Associate Dean of Faculty, and Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives at USC's School of Dramatic Arts
Feuchtwanger Refreshed is an ongoing collaboration between USC's School of Dramatic Arts MFA Dramatic Writing Program, USC Libraries, and Villa Aurora through which graduate playwrights and their instructors present short scenes inspired by archival holdings and writings from USC's Feuchtwanger Memorial Library.
Parking Information
There is no parking at Villa Aurora. Street Parking is available on Los Liones Drive. Shuttle service starts at 6:30 pm from Los Liones Drive, off Sunset Boulevard two blocks North East of Pacific Coast Highway. Please do not park in the Topanga State Park Lot!
Partner
In cooperation with the USC School of Dramatic Arts and USC Libraries
Marta – An Installation by Sonya Schönberger
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Information
Do our possessions reflect the essence of who we are as people and bear the memories of our life experiences? What is the result when an artist “inhabits” someone else’s world or looks for the traces of who they were in their personal belongings?
In 2022, Berlin-based visual artist Sonya Schönberger was a fellow at Villa Aurora, and spent three months sleeping in the former bedroom of Marta Feuchtwanger (1891–1987). Marta was the wife of German-Jewish exile writer Lion Feuchtwanger, whose antifascist writing was so influential he was declared “Public Enemy #1” by Joseph Goebbels in the run-up to World War II.
With the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, the couple fled Europe. They settled in Pacific Palisades in 1943, where they rebuilt their collection of rare books. Their house, named Villa Aurora, became a haven for fellow exile writers. The Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, part of USC’s Special Collections, contains their books, papers, and memorabilia.
In her artistic work, Schönberger primarily focuses on autobiographical challenges caused by political change, mainly through the lens of German history. While being and feeling close to Marta, she tried to understand who this woman was, and what her life was like—both with Lion by her side and in the thirty years alone at the Villa after he passed away. Marta is an installation composed of contemporary photographs paired with rare archival materials from the Feuchtwanger collections donated by Marta to the USC Libraries upon her death.
This exhibition, cosponsored by Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House, seeks to recover the voice of Marta, whose contributions have long been overshadowed by academic investigation of her husband’s life and work.
RSVP here
Partner
East-German Artistic Networks of the 1980s: Lecture & Conversation with Stephanie Barron, Constanze Fritzsch, and Isotta Poggi
Thomas Mann House
Information
In the last decade of the East German regime, artists wove dynamic networks to exchange art and ideas. They built alternative communication channels through artists’ books and magazines that together are a remarkable memory of the spirit of the time. Most of these publications (called samizdat for “self-published” in Russian) are collaborative projects of artists’ groups or collectives who produced small editions to circumvent censorship, while also to celebrate mutual friendship and solidarity in a playful atmosphere of experimentation.
On the fifth anniversary of Edition Augenweide, Jörg Kowalski wrote that it was not so much political ambitions that inspired the making of the first book, but rather the longing for that atmosphere of openness and trust that is necessary for art to flourish. This group’s aim was to draw on book art traditions of the twenties while finding an innovative synthesis between literary content and art design. These artistic and literary projects provided a forum outside of the official discourse of the GDR and developed a new literary and visual language that would defy artistic dogmas.
These rare editions, combining a variety of original graphic media on paper and vintage photographs with poetry and prose, offer an opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue on a period of transformation and reform that ended with a peaceful revolution and the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989.
As part of the Thomas Mann House annual topic "Democracy & Vulnerability," it is crucial to revisit and reconsider these artists. The independent artistic and cultural networks resonate with the debates of writers and artists in the Thomas Mann House who sought creative spaces while in exile and means of creating art outside of censorship. Los Angeles hosted the innovative exhibition “Art of Two Germanys ” organized by LACMA in 2009 and is home to the Wende Museum, which focuses on Cold War history. These resources provide an opportunity for dialogue on the past and the present about the artistic and existential debates that contributed to and shaped a period of historical reform and transformation. They can shed new light on East Germany’s forgotten (or ignored) history.
Join acclaimed curators and art historians Stephanie Barron, Constanze Fritzsch, and Isotta Poggi for a conversation on how these materials are vibrant witnesses of a generation who made art to find a voice.
Participants
Stephanie Barron is Senior Curator and Modern Art Department Head at LACMA. Among her exhibitions and publications over the past 40 years are The Russian Avant- Garde: 1910-1930: New Perspectives; German Expressionist Sculpture; ’Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany; Exiles + Émigrés- The Flight of European Artists from Hitler; Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, and exhibitions of Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Frank Gehry, David Hockney, Ed Kienholz, Sharon Lockhart, John McLaughlin, Rene Magritte, and Ken Price. She has received the Order of Merit, First Class and the Commander’s Cross from the German government in recognition of her work in the field of modern German art. Her exhibitions and publications have five times been voted the best in the United States by the International Art Critics Association, three times by the Art Museum Curators Association, and she has twice received the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for best museum catalog. A long standing member of the Art Advisory Panel of the IRS, she is a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and trustee of the John Baldessari Foundation, past chair of the Mike Kelley Foundation, and serves on the board of The Industry Los Angeles.
Constanze Fritzsch is a Fulbright Fellow at the GRI. She holds a doctorate from the Catholic University in Eichstätt-Ingolstadt after getting her MA in art history from the University Paris Nanterre and her BA in art history from University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She got a fellowship of the ENS de Paris as a foreign exchange student. She is a former member of the “Á chacun son reel” research project run by the German Forum for Art History in Paris and worked as an assistant curator at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. She has been on the academic staff at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden and the University of Leipzig and Dresden, and worked as a student assistant at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris.
Isotta Poggi is associate curator of photographs at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Her collecting interests focus on the cultural history of photography from the nineteenth century through contemporary, as a medium for documentary and artistic practice, and as a narrative tool in albums, photobooks, and artists’ books. In 2018 she co-curated the exhibition Promote, Tolerate, Ban: Art and Culture in Cold War Hungary at the Wende Museum, and co-edited the accompanying volume. Drawing on the extensive archival holdings and special collections of the Getty Research Institute, she is currently directing the research project “On the Eve of Revolution: The East German Artist in the 1980s.”
Partner
This event is a collaboration between the Getty Research Institute and Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House.
Zemlinsky & Exile Composers
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Information
Zemlinsky & Exile Composers – Recovered Voices at LA Opera & the Colburn School and the Musica Non Grata program of Prague Operas
Villa Aurora is the former home of writer Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta who regularly hosted one of the most influential salons of “Weimar by the Sea”. With the series “Remembering the Exiles”, Villa Aurora commemorates the Feuchtwangers and other artists and intellectuals displaced and often silenced by the Nazi regime.
Following a performance of works by Alexander Zemlinsky and other exiled composers, we will present a panel discussion led by James Conlon on the fate of exiled composers and the quest to make their voices heard again, a mission the LA Opera and Colburn School Recovered Voices initiatives share with the Musica Non Grata program initiated by the National Theatre Opera and the State Opera in Prague.
Program
Erwin Schulhoff: Suite No. 3 for Piano (left hand alone), WV 80, 1st movement: Preludio 5’
Domenic Cheli
Welcome and Intro
Dr. Markus Klimmer, Michelle Müntefering MdB, Amb. Jaroslav Olša, Jr.
Vítězslava Kaprálová 10’
Sbohem a Šáteček, op. 14; From Vteřiny, op. 18; #3 Nº 2 Písen Milostná;
Nº 4 Velikonoce
Kathleen O’Hara, Blair Salter
Talk
Joy H. Calico, Per Boye Hansen, Prof. Jan Burian
Vítězslava Kaprálová: Elegie for Violin and Piano 4’
Adam Milstein, Domenic Cheli
Talk
Joy H. Calico, Maestro James Conlon
Zemlinsky Maeterlinck Lieder 20’
Madeleine Lyon, Chi-Jo Lee
Break
Final Discussion
Joy H. Calico, Per Boye Hansen, Maestro James Conlon
Bohuslav Martinů: Violin Sonata No. 2, H. 208 20’
Adam Millstein, Domenic Cheli
Reception
Recovered Voices
LA Opera’s Recovered Voices initiative, launched in 2007, is one of the company's most important and celebrated artistic achievements. Made possible thanks to generous support from Marilyn Ziering and the Ziering Family Foundation, Recovered Voices has not only been a welcome journey into the supercharged emotions and lush imagery of late Romantic music, but it has also been a critical step in bringing some of the great lost masters of opera to light. With the launch of Recovered Voices, LA Opera became the only major American opera company to regularly program the works of composers affected by the rise of the Third Reich.
Led by Founder and Director James Conlon and inspired by LA Opera’s Recovered Voices project, the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices at The Colburn School was established in 2013 with the support of Marilyn Ziering. Through performances in Southern California and around the world, writings, original video series, a Ted Talk titled “Resurrecting Forbidden Music”, classes, competitions, symposia, recordings, and more, the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices brings well-deserved attention to composers whose names and works were very nearly eliminated from history. It is designed also to inspire young musicians to learn about the artists and return to their music throughout their career.
Musica Non Grata
The Musica Non Grata project, initiated by Prague Operas and presented with financial support from the Federal Republic of Germany, revives the legacy of composers who played a vital role in the musical life of interwar Czechoslovakia and who were persecuted by the Nazis due to their ethnicity, gender, religion or political opinions.
Participants
In 1984, Jan Burian completed his studies of stage direction at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. In his final year, he worked as a director at the Evening Brno Theatre of Satire. His first engagement was at the Oldřich Stibor Theatre in Olomouc. In 1986, he served as a guest stage director in Plzeň, where in the next year he was engaged. Until 1989, when he assumed the post of Artistic Director of the Plzeň drama company, he staged a number of remarkable productions, including of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Adam and Eve, Karel Steigerwald’s The Tartar Fair and, in Czechoslovak premiere, Alexander Kazantsev’s Eve’s Dreams. In 1990, he staged the Czechoslovak premiere of Václav Havel’s play Temptation. From 1991 to 1995, he worked at the Vinohrady Theatre in Prague.
As Music Director of LA Opera, James Conlon has led more operas than any other conductor in company history—over 500 performances of more than 60 works. Highlights of his LA Opera tenure include the company’s first Ring cycle; initiating the groundbreaking Recovered Voices series, an ongoing commitment to staging masterpieces of 20th-century European opera suppressed by the Third Reich; spearheading Britten 100/LA, a city-wide celebration honoring the composer’s centennial; and conducting the west coast premiere of The Anonymous Lover by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a prominent Black composer in 18th-century France.
Joy H. Calico is Professor of Musicology and Director of Graduate Studies in the Musicology Department. Her scholarship focuses on interdisciplinary Cold War cultural politics, opera since 1900, and Arnold Schoenberg. She is the author of two monographs published by University of California Press: Brecht at the Opera (2008; paperback 2019) and Arnold Schoenberg’sA Survivor from Warsawin Postwar Europe (2014; expanded Italian edition published in 2023; Russian translation forthcoming in 2024). Her current book project, also under contract with California, is a theory of twentieth- and twenty-first-century opera according to scene type built on Kaija Saariaho’s L’amourde loin. She is also co-editor with Justin Vickers of a collection for OUP entitled Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900.
Per Boye Hansen is an experienced opera, music and theatre manager. Born in Oslo in 1957, from 2012 to 2017 he held the post of Artistic Director of Den Norske Opera (Norwegian National Opera), which during his tenure rose to become a prominent opera company and enjoyed great international acclaim. Between 2005 and 2012, he served as General and Artistic Director of the Bergen International Festival. The largest of its kind in Northern Europe, it annually presents a number of world premieres in the field of dance, theatre, classical music and opera
Performers
Kathleen O’Mara is a Young Artist in the LA Opera’s Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program. She graduated from the Juilliard School with a M.M. in 2020 and Westminster Choir College with her B.M. in 2018. Kathleen made her LA Opera debut as Berta in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia this past fall. She will also be singing the First Maid in Zemlinksy’s Der Zwerg with LA Opera. In the summer of 2024, she will be a Gaddes Festival Artist with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, where she will appear as Duchess Christina in Galileo Galilei by Philip Glass. In the summer of 2023, she covered the role of Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte for both Opera Theatre of St. Louis and Palm Beach Opera, after previously performing Fiordiligi at the Juilliard School in 2019. She has covered various roles including the First Lady in The Magic Flute with the CoOPERAtive Program, Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro with Music Academy of the West, the Governess in The Turn of the Screw, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and Susan B. Anthony in Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All at Juilliard. She has participated in programs including the Gerdine Young Artist Program at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Palm Beach Opera’s Apprentice Program, Sewanee Summer Music Festival, Houston Grand Opera’s Young Artist Vocal Academy, and Music Academy of the West.
Madeleine Lyon, mezzo-soprano, is a proud native of San Marcos, Texas. In 2022, Ms. Lyon joined the Los Angeles Opera as a Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist. She made her LA Opera main stage debut as Alisa in Lucia di Lammermoor, a new production co-produced with the Metropolitan Opera. She was also seen as Bianca in LA Opera’s production of The Rape of Lucretia, Genevieve/Yniold in Impressions of Pelleas, and Bithia in Moses by Henry Mollicone. In 2022, Ms. Lyon finished her graduate studies at Rice University where she previously obtained her Bachelor of Music degree in 2019. There she was seen as Zerlina in Don Giovanni, the title role in Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, and Taller Zegner in Missy Mazzoli’s Proving Up. She is also passionate about oratorio and concert work, and has been the mezzo soloist in the Mozart Requiem, Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and selections from the Verdi Requiem. This summer, Madeleine will join Opera Theatre St. Louis as a Gerdine Young Artist, where she will sing the role of Nirena in Giulio Cesare. Ms. Lyon is also an avid painter and loves to spend time with her grey tabby cat, Pickle.
Canadian collaborative pianist Blair Salter is a versatile performer and music director who has worked at prestigious opera companies throughout North America. Blair is currently Head Coach for the LA Opera Young Artist Program, and has been a member of the music staff at Santa Fe Opera since 2019. She has previously worked as music staff at San Francisco Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Colorado, Michigan Opera Theatre, and New Orleans Opera, and was Music Director for Opera Theatre at Penn State University from 2021-23. Blair was a conductor with The Dallas Opera's Hart Institute in 2023, and she is the creator of the contemporary aria database Voce Moderna. She is a graduate of the Houston Grand Opera Studio, San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, Wolf Trap Opera, and the Glimmerglass Festival; Blair completed her DMA at the University of Michigan, where she studied with Martin Katz.
Adam Millstein is a violinist who is developing a multifaceted career as a performer, lecturer, and music curator. He is currently pursuing his Artist Diploma at the Colburn School in Los Angeles under the renowned pedagogue, Robert Lipsett. He holds his Masters Degree from Colburn and his Bachelor of Musical Arts Degree from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Danielle Belen. Millstein is also the Program Manager of the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices at the Colburn School.
Dominic Cheli embraces the role of an artist-citizen in his multifaceted career as performer, educator, composer, and director. He is described as an “inspired keyboardist” (artsfuse) whose playing is “spontaneous yet perfect, the best of how a young person can play.” (Symphony Magazine). His rapidly advancing career included his Walt Disney Concert Hall Debut with the Colburn Orchestra where Dominic was “mesmerizing, (he) transfixed the audience.” (LA Times). He gave his Carnegie Hall Recital Debut in 2019 and has had a busy performing and recording career ever since. He recorded his 2nd CD on the Naxos label of the music of Liszt/Schubert, and was a performer/ producer/editor on a 3rd CD of the music of Erwin Schulhoff for the Delos Label featuring his collaboration on Piano Concerto no.2 with Maestro James Conlon. He also recently completed work as a composer, audio editor and performer on the documentary Defying Gravity (2021).
Chi-Jo Lee, currently pursuing her Artist Diploma in piano performance at the Colburn Conservatory of Music, where she previously received her master’s degree, studying with Fabio Bidini. She made her recital debut in 2015 and has won prizes in competitions in Asia and the United States, including Wideman International Piano competition, The Odyssiad Festival and Competition, the Eslite chamber music audition in Taiwan, and the concerto competitions at Indiana University and The Colbuen School. Ms. Lee is an alumna at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where she studied with pianist André Watts, and was the recipient of three scholarships. Her performances have recently been reviewed positively by the San Diego Union-Tribune and The Santa Barbara Independent.
More Information
Street Parking is available on Los Liones Drive. Shuttle service starts at 2:00 pm from Los Liones Drive, off Sunset Boulevard two blocks North East of Pacific Coast Highway. Please do not park in the Topanga State Park Lot!
Partners
In cooperation with the Los Angeles Opera and the Colburn School
An evening with Cate Blanchett and Julian Rosefeldt
Nuart Theatre (11272 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles)
An evening with Cate Blanchett and Julian Rosefeldt
Double Feature
MANIFESTO and private Sneak Preview of Rosefeldt’s new film
Following the world tour of the art installation and film version of Manifesto, two-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett and artist-filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt have teamed up again for his new film, which will be screened after Manifesto in a private sneak preview, including a Q&A with the two artists.
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Following the world tour of the art installation and film version of Manifesto, two-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett and artist-filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt have teamed up again for his new film, which will be screened after Manifesto in a private sneak preview, including a Q&A with the two artists.
MANIFESTO – starring an overwhelmingly multi-faceted Cate Blanchett – pays homage to the moving tradition and literary beauty of artist manifestos, ultimately questioning the role of the artist in a society threatened by populist tendencies.
The film draws on the writings of Futurists, Dadaists, Fluxus artists, Suprematists, Situationists, Dogma 95, and other artist groups, and the musings of individual artists, architects, dancers, and filmmakers. Passing the ideas of Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Kazimir Malevich, André Breton, Sturtevant, Sol LeWitt, Jim Jarmusch, and other influencers through his lens, Rosefeldt has edited and reassembled new collages of artists’ manifestos.
Performing this ‘manifesto of manifestos’ as a contemporary call to action, while inhabiting 13 different personas – among them a school teacher, a puppeteer, a newsreader, a factory worker, and a homeless man – Australian actress Cate Blanchett imbues new dramatic life into bothfamous and lesser known words in unexpected contexts. Rosefeldt’s work reveals both the performative component and the political significance of these declarations. Often written in youthful rage, they not only express the wish to change the world through art but also reflect the voice of a generation. Exploring the powerful urgency of these historical statements Manifesto questions whether the words and sentiments have withstood the passage of time. Can they be applied universally? And how have the dynamics between politics, art and life shifted?
Berlin-based artist Julian Rosefeldt is internationally renowned for his visually opulent and meticulously choreographed moving image artworks, presented as complex multi-screen installations in museum spaces. Inspired equally by the histories of film, art and popular culture, Rosefeldt uses familiar cinematic tropes to carry viewers into surreal, theatrical realms, where the inhabitants are absorbed by the rituals of everyday life, employing humor and satire to seduce audiences into familiar worlds made strange.
Julian Rosefeldt is Villa Aurora Fellow of Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.
Manifesto won three Lolas (German Film Academy Awards) and the German Camera Award.
Partner
In cooperation with Landmark's Nuart Theatre
Meet The Artists – New date!
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Reception with our current artists-in-residence Constantin Lieb (Screenwriter), Arjuna Neuman (Filmmaker), Molly Nilsson (Musician), Julian Rosefeldt (Visual Artist) & Maryam Zaree (Filmmaker).
RSVP here !
Participants
Constantin Lieb
Constantin Lieb studied philosophy, German literature, and applied literature in Berlin. In his work as a screenwriter, he is interested in the combination of narrative cinema with literary forms and themes from the visual arts. Since 2021, he has been publishing the podcast Filmskript – Über das Drehbuchschreiben (Film Script – On Screenwriting) of the German Film Academy with Heide Schwochow; in addition, he works as a dramaturg. Together with Felix von Boehm, he founded the communication agency art/beats and realized a variety of documentary films for artists, galleries, and museums.
Arjuna Neuman
Arjuna Neuman was born on an airplane. He is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. He has exhibited at Kunsthalle Vienna, MACBA Barcelona, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, and Showroom Gallery London, among others. His videos and films have been widely shown, notably at Berlinale Forum Expanded, Doclisboa, and Images Festival, and are distributed by LUX London. Neuman is co-founder of www.archiveofbelonging.org, a database for migrants and refugees. Arjuna Neuman lives and works in Berlin.
Molly Nilsson
Molly Nilsson is a Swedish-born artist, producer, and songwriter residing in Berlin since 2005. She began composing in 2006 and self-released her first album, These Things Take Time, in 2008. The following year she founded her own label, Dark Skies Association. She has toured extensively in Europe, North America, South America, Oceania, and Asia. Her latest album, Extreme, was released in 2022. She is currently working on her 11th full-length album.
Julian Rosefeldt
Julian Rosefeldt studied architecture in Munich and Barcelona. His video and film works oscillate at the interface between narrative film and complex video art. He enjoyed worldwide success with his film installation Manifesto (2015), the cinema version of which had its world premiere at the Sundance Festival in 2017. Since 2010 Rosefeldt has been a member of the Film and Media Art Department at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and since 2011 Professor of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
Maryam Zaree
Maryam Zaree is an actress, writer, and filmmaker. She was born in 1983 in the political prison Evin in Tehran. When she was two, her mother fled with her to Frankfurt am Main. She has appeared in many cinema and television films, including Christian Petzold's Transit, the series 4 Blocks, and Systemsprenger by Nora Fingscheidt. Her first feature film, the documentary Born in Evin, premiered at the 2019 Berlinale and screened in over 40 countries. Together with Carolin Emcke and Lena Gorelik, she developed the reading tour "‘Is That a Human Being?’ – Against Forgetting” with texts by Shoah survivors.
Parking information
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting at 3:30 pm. Last shuttle to Villa Aurora leaves 15 minutes prior to the event.
Arendt & Blücher: A conversation between experts Barbara von Bechtolsheim & David D. Kim
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
A conversation between David D. Kim and author Barbara von Bechtolsheim about Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher on the occasion of Bechtolsheim's biography of the couple.
Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher met as exiles in Paris. Four years later, they married and soon emigrated to the United States. They found their intellectual and emotional home in their dialogue with one another. Arendt and Blücher were almost inseparable: for over thirty years, they inspired each other another philosophical workshop, disagreeing with one another, trusting one another, and maintaining friendships with artists, literati, and philosophers. Their exile experience shapes the political thought and action of a creative couple who still inspires us today.
Author Barbara von Bechtolsheim will explore with David D. Kim how both figures lived and reflected upon exile, freedom, and social responsibility.
Participants
Barbara von Bechtolsheim studied Literature, Philosophy and Psychology in Munich and Stanford. She teaches Literature and Cultural Studies at various universities and researches the creativity of couples. As a literary translator, she acts as intermediary between American and German culture in many different ways.
David D. Kim is Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and Associate Vice Provost at the International Institute. Professor Kim’s scholarly interests range from postcolonial, global and migration studies and community engagement to human rights, cosmopolitanism, cultural and political theories, global literary histories, and digital humanities. He is the author of Arendt’s Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2024), which tracks various manifestations of this vexing concept in the political theorist’s archival documents, publications and recordings.
Parking Information
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting at 6:30 pm. Last shuttle to Villa Aurora leaves 15 minutes prior to the event.
Screening & Discussion: Hans Werner Henze – Music, Friendship, Game
Crescent Theatre (100 N Crescent Drive, Beverly Hills, 90210)
Information
HANS WERNER HENZE – Music Friendship Game
This documentary is a journey through the life of Hans Werner Henze, one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Born in 1926 in Guetersloh, Germany, the son of a school teacher, Henze was acclaimed for his many operas, symphonies, ballets, and for a commitment to political art.
As a youth in Germany, World War II left indelible marks on him through his lifelong hatred of Nazism. Henze’s father was killed on the Eastern Front, and Hans was conscripted into the army in 1944, and ended the war in a British prisoner-of-war camp. His anguish was worsened by his sense of shame for the Holocaust. Furthermore, he felt he was ostracized and abhorred as a homosexual in an intolerant society.
After the mass emigration of German artists and intellectuals who started new lives elsewhere, Hans Werner Henze left Germany in 1953 and moved to the Italian island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. He remained in Italy for the rest of his life.
The documentary reconstructs his artistic journey and recounts his longing for freedom and joy through his liberating creative process that was entwined with his personal suffering.
Director Nina di Majo met Henze in her youth at her family’s home in Naples. She poetically highlights Henze’s long friendship and fruitful collaboration with Ingeborg Bachmann through their letters.
Working with her as librettist, Henze composed the Operas Der Prinz von Homburg (1958), based on a text by Heinrich von Kleist, and Der Junge Lord (1964). The film also includes interviews with Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, (musicologist), Sir Simon Rattle (conductor), Alessio Vlad (composer), and Francesco Antonioni (composer), et al.
"Music is a means of communication and understanding," he said, "a means of reconciliation.”
Nina di Majo was born in Naples, Italy. She is an actress, director and producer. She teaches screenwriting and linear audiovisuals at several Universities in Italy(NABA,IULM, UNISA, Accademia Belle Arti of Naples. After having worked in opera theater and theater as assistant director Nina started to work in Cinema as assistant director of Mario Martone.
Nina wrote and directed several short and films.
“Beck to the wall“ ( 1998) won the David di Donatello award for best
Italian short film, and the Golden and Silver Sacher Award at the Nanni Moretti's Sacher Film Festival.
“Autumn”,( 1999) was selected at the Venice Film
festival, Chicago International Film festival, Nice film Festival(USA) and by other international film festivals .
“Winter”,(2022),presented at the Berlinale Film Festival, won
the International Press Award for Best Actor( Fabrizio Gifuni),and
the International Cinematographer Award. “Winter” was also the
only Italian candidate for the European Award at the Hollywood Film Festival.
In 2009 she wrote, with Francesco Bruni and Antonio Leotti, and directed a comedy, “Weddings and Other Disasters”.
In 2017 she wrote and directed the documentary Hans Werner Henze : Music, Friendship, Game., that was presented at the Madrid Film Festival and other Festival, screened at the Mother Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, and distributed on TV by Sky Classica.
Nina did several documentaries and video- sound performances on Art installations by Peter Greenaway, Anish Kapoor, Umberto Manzo, Natalie Sylva, Hans Werner Henze, Nanni Balestrini .
Nina lives in Milan.
More Information
SCHEDULE:
6:00pm Reception
6:30pm Screening
9:30pm Discussion with director Nina di Majo
100 N Crescent Drive
Beverly Hills , 90210
Partners
In collaboration with Italian Institute of Culture Los Angeles and VATMH Los Angeles.
Artist Talk: Janet Sternburg in Conversation with Lorenz Kienzle
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Author and photographer Janet Sternburg and Villa Aurora Fellow Lorenz Kienzle discuss the exploration of unfamiliar territories through photography and an awareness of foreignness juxtaposed with the “assumption of ownership foreigners can bring to adopted places”.
On the occasion of the release LOOKING AT MEXICO / Mexico Looks Back (2023).
Admission is free, please RSVP here.
Participants
Lorenz Kienzle, born in Munich, studied photography in Rome and Berlin. In earlier projects and publications, he dealt with East German industrial culture. In 2006, he began a long-term collaboration with the U.S. sculptor Richard Serra. Since 2010 he has been working on several projects on fictional and real places in the work of Theodor Fontane and Alfred Döblin. Since 2018, he has also been dealing, in his curatorial work, with the estates of East German photographers. Lorenz Kienzle lives and works in Berlin.
Lorenz Kienzle is a Villa Aurora Fellow of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin.
Janet Sternburg is a writer of memoirs, essays, poetry, and plays, as well as a fine art photographer. Her literary books include two memoirs, "White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine" (Hawthorne Books) and "Phantom Limb: A Meditation on Memory" (University of Nebraska Press) as well as the classic two volumes of "The Writer on Her Work" (W.W. Norton) described by Poets & Writers as "groundbreaking...a landmark," and "Optic Nerve: Photopoems" (Red Hen Press). In addition, she has published two previous monographs from Distanz Verlag: "Overspilling World: The Photographs of Janet Sternburg" with a foreword by Wim Wenders, and "I've Been Walking: Janet Sternburg, Los Angeles Photographs."
She is the recipient of the REDCAT AWARD, given to “individuals who exemplify the creativity and talent that define and lead the evolution of contemporary culture.”
LOOKING AT MEXICO / Mexico Looks Back (2023).
In the book’s introduction, Sternburg explains how, having no high-quality camera, she took her first photographs in Mexico, more than 20 years ago, using a simple, “disposable,” single-use camera, and how this led everything in the frame, including reflections, to appear in a single “interpenetrating” plane. For Sternburg, this was an innovation. Many of the photos here are imbued with a similar planar elision, often to breathtaking effect. Captured with an iPhone 10, they show, “without manipulation,” people and places around Sternburg’s adopted home of San Miguel de Allende, in Guanajuato, Mexico, and other locations such as Mexico City and Mérida. “In a world full of manipulated imagery,” Sternburg writes, “I don’t see, at least for myself, any need to distort.” No need at all. Her camera eye catches intersecting planes of light and color, ambience and moods both intriguing and austere. The result is a dazzling book of complex gravity and stunning beauty.
Source: Los Angeles Review of Books, Multifaceted Portals of Discovery: On Janet Sternburg’s “Looking at Mexico / Mexico Looks Back”
More Information
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting at x:xx pm. Last shuttle to Villa Aurora leaves 15 minutes prior to the event.
Artist Talk: Karosh Taha in Conversation with Senthuran Varatharajah
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
In conversation with writer and philosopher Senthuran Varatharajah, Villa Aurora writer-in-residence Karosh Taha presents her third novel and reads passages from the work-in-progress.
Taha is currently working on a novel that tells of the doppelganger theory of the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. One can speak of a myth, a political conspiracy theory, an urban legend, or targeted propaganda, but in the reality of the novel there is the doppelganger and his wife.
To live up to the original, the doppelganger has to give up his own self - but when the copy is so convincing that even the secret service cannot distinguish between the two men, the question arises how people are supposed to maintain their individuality when the most powerful man in the country is reduced to a mere effigy by the regime he himself has created.
On a formal level, the novel challenges the construct of the narrative by working with different styles and voices and by offering an intertextual examination of intelligence documents and religious texts.
Participants
Karosh Taha was born in the Kurdish city of Zaxo. She lives and writes in Cologne and Paris. Taha studied English and history at the University of Duisburg-Essen and, in addition to her work as an author, initially worked as a high school teacher. She has received numerous prizes and scholarships for her works. Her latest publication is available in English.
Senthuran Varatharajah, born in 1984 in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, studied philosophy, Protestant theology, and comparative religious and cultural studies in Marburg, Berlin, and London. In 2016, his debut novel "Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen" ("Before the Increase of Signs") was published by S. Fischer Verlag and received multiple awards. In 2022, his also highly acclaimed novel "Rot (Hunger)" ("Red (Hunger)") followed, published by the same publisher. As writer-in-residence 2017, Senthuran Varatharajah is a Villa Aurora alumn. He lives in Berlin.
More Information
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting at 6:00 pm. Last shuttle to Villa Aurora leaves 15 minutes prior to the event.
Meet The Artists
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Participants
Lorenz Kienzle, born in Munich, studied photography in Rome and Berlin. In earlier projects and publications, he dealt with East German industrial culture. In 2006, he began a long-term collaboration with the U.S. sculptor Richard Serra. Since 2010 he has been working on several projects on fictional and real places in the work of Theodor Fontane and Alfred Döblin. Since 2018, he has also been dealing, in his curatorial work, with the estates of East German photographers. Lorenz Kienzle lives and works in Berlin.
His planned project for his stay at Villa Aurora, "Döblin in Exile in L.A.," adds important biographical aspects to Kienzle's photographic-artistic work "Döblin and the Metropolis." Kienzle intends to photograph real and fictional places in Los Angeles and connect them with quotes from Döblin. His project is based on Döblin's extensive correspondence as well as biographical notes. Together with his already existing work, he wants to create an exhibition that is filled with the voices of the author and his fictional characters and that reflects on the social and political upheavals recurring in our time.
Lorenz Kienzle is Villa Aurora Fellow of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Mert Moralı is a Berlin-based composer from Izmir, Turkey. His current art and research practice focuses on the relationship between prosthesis and corporeality and on how this relationship is conditioned by space and its socio-political connotations. He studied theory and composition at Bilkent University and composition and electroacoustic music at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin.
During his residency, Mert Moralı intends to create a compositional platform to explore the extent to which the performing body can resist archiving, cataloging, and death. He will address the question of how the dead work of artists is recycled in the form of recordings through collaboration with the living for the purpose of capital accumulation. In his work, he aims to connect this recycling and accumulation to the temporal-spatial conditions of the sites in Southern California.
Eva Müller is a freelance cartoonist, writer, and artist. She lives and works in Hamburg. Her stories are published internationally, presented in multimedia readings at festivals, cinemas, literature houses, and museums, and have won several awards. She is also an activist and cultural worker, most recently as co-founder of the Comics Union under the umbrella of documenta fifteen.
As part of her project at Villa Aurora, Eva Müller is planning a graphic novel that will shed light on the lives of the four women killed by Fritz Honka: Frieda Roblick, Gertrud Breuer, Anna Beuschel, and Ruth Schult, who are virtually unknown. These reconstructed biographies are representative of many biographies of women in the FRG of the 1970s, who often fought hopeless battles for their existence.
Laurie Schwartz is a composer, intermedia artist, and curator whose work considers sound, movement, and visuals as materials of composition in the broadest sense. Incorporating field recordings, fragments of conversation, choreography, or video in counterpoint with instrumental, vocal and/or electronically processed sounds, she probes the space between music composition, experimental theater, and performance art. She is initiator and curator of the series itinerant interludes that presents performances at exhibition openings in galleries and museums.
During her time at Villa Aurora, Laurie Schwartz will develop two intermedia projects: clouds & colloquies, a performative installation centering on the theme of precarity (environmental, societal, and political) and the furies, a multimedia work (episode #3 of her performance series Outtakes from the Dangerous Women Files) focusing on the witch as feminist archetype and disrupter.
Karosh Taha was born in the Kurdish city of Zaxo. She lives and writes in Cologne and Paris. Taha studied English and history at the University of Duisburg-Essen and, in addition to her work as an author, initially worked as a high school teacher. She has received numerous prizes and scholarships for her works. Her latest publication is available in English.
In Los Angeles, Karosh Taha will work on a novel that tells of the doppelganger theory of the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. One can speak of a myth, a political conspiracy theory, an urban legend, or targeted propaganda, but in the reality of the novel there is the doppelganger and his wife. To live up to the original, the doppelganger has to give up his own self – but when the copy is so convincing that even the secret service cannot distinguish between the two men, the question arises how people are supposed to maintain their individuality when the most powerful man in the country is merely reduced to an effigy by the self-created regime. On a formal level, the novel challenges the construct of the narrative by working with different styles and voices and by offering an intertextual examination of intelligence documents and religious texts.
Parking Information
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting at 6:30 pm. Last shuttle to Villa Aurora leaves 15 minutes prior to the event.
Haunted Territory: The Weight of History
The Wende Museum (10808 Culver Blvd, Culver City)
Jenny Erpenbeck’s childhood, she has commented, “belongs in a museum.” Born in the now-defunct GDR; she was twenty-two and in university when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. In her most recent novel, Kairos, Erpenbeck narrates two breakups: one romantic, one political. An intense and formative relationship collapses, like the GDR, leaving behind a narrative ruin. In Go, Went, Gone (2015), she centers her novel on the moral question of asylum, through an encounter between a privileged German citizen and a small group of displaced African refugees. Erpenbeck, an epic storyteller and one of the most celebrated authors in Germany, discusses her work with novelist Charmaine Craig at the Wende Museum, whose mission is to explore the complicated legacy of the Cold War and its relevance to contemporary social and political issues.
Participant
Louise Steinman is a writer, artist, and literary curator. She is the author of three books, including The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation; and The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War. She was the founder and longtime curator of the ALOUD series at the Los Angeles Public Library and currently co-directs the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. www.louisesteinman.com
Partner
In cooperation with the Wende Museum
Organ & Electronics Concert at the Villa
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Our current composition fellows at Villa Aurora, Laurie Schwarz and Mert Moralı, together with their composer friend Jack Herscowitz from the Los Angeles scene, invite you to re-imagine and re-experience the acoustic space of the Villa with two improvisational sets of electronics and organ.
Duration: 50 minutes
June 2, 2024
2:00 PM - PDT
Admission is free
RSVP mandatory here
Participants
Mert Moralı is a Berlin-based composer from Izmir, Turkey. His current art and research practice focuses on the relationship between prosthesis and corporeality and on how this relationship is conditioned by space and its socio-political connotations. He studied theory and composition at Bilkent University and composition and electroacoustic music at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin.
During his residency, Mert Moralı intends to create a compositional platform to explore the extent to which the performing body can resist archiving, cataloging, and death. He will address the question of how the dead work of artists is recycled in the form of recordings through collaboration with the living for the purpose of capital accumulation. In his work, he aims to connect this recycling and accumulation to the temporal-spatial conditions of the sites in Southern California.
Laurie Schwartz is a composer, intermedia artist, and curator whose work considers sound, movement, and visuals as materials of composition in the broadest sense. Incorporating field recordings, fragments of conversation, choreography, or video in counterpoint with instrumental, vocal and/or electronically processed sounds, she probes the space between music composition, experimental theater, and performance art. She is initiator and curator of the series itinerant interludes that presents performances at exhibition openings in galleries and museums.
During her time at Villa Aurora, Laurie Schwartz will develop two intermedia projects: clouds & colloquies, a performative installation centering on the theme of precarity (environmental, societal, and political) and the furies, a multimedia work (episode #3 of her performance series Outtakes from the Dangerous Women Files) focusing on the witch as feminist archetype and disrupter.
Parking Information
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting 1 hour before the event. Last shuttle to Villa Aurora leaves 15 minutes prior to the event.
SCHEIBLETTENKIND: Book Presentation and Discussion
Goethe-Institut San Franciso (657 Howard Street San Francisco, CA 94105 USA)
Participant
Eva Müller is a freelance cartoonist, writer, and artist. She lives and works in Hamburg. Her stories are published internationally, presented in multimedia readings at festivals, cinemas, literature houses, and museums, and have won several awards. She is also an activist and cultural worker, most recently as co-founder of the Comics Union under the umbrella of documenta fifteen.
Partner
In cooperation with the Goethe Institut San Francisco
Archives in / of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Information
The workshop "Archives in / of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present" explores new ways of thinking about archives, archival records, and other artifacts historians might use as primary sources to gain deeper insight into the history of migrants in transit and the knowledge they possessed, produced, transmitted, or lost. With a starting point in the history of Jewish migration from National Socialist-occupied areas, the workshop broadens out to investigate the experiences of refugees and migrants fleeing genocide, armed conflict, and persecution throughout the twentieth century. Specifically, it uses the idea of “lost knowledge” (Steinberg/Strobl) to ask how migrants who leave their homes try to convey both the sense of loss and the disorientation that accompany the navigation of new lived realities—from the geographical to the socio-cultural, political, and beyond—in correspondence or other materials that capture any aspect of their flight and migration.
The workshop is convened by the German Historical Institute Washington; USC Shoah Foundation; Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway; University of London; Queen Mary, University of London; and the Wiener Holocaust Library, London. Partners of the event are USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research; Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles; Villa Aurora, Los Angeles; and Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
The full program of the workshop can be found here.
Please RSVP here.
On the occasion of the workshop "Archives in / of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present," Villa Aurora is hosting a series of panels for invited workshop participants on the topics "Solidarity, Gender, and Activism," "Collections and Agency" and "War and Violence."
This event is convened by the German Historical Institute Washington; USC Shoah Foundation; Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway; University of London; Queen Mary, University of London; Wiener Holocaust Library, London & Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.
Meet The Artists
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Participants
Emma Braslavsky is a writer, curator, and director. The meaning and future of humanity are her main topics. She has published multiple award-winning novels, audio art, art works, and exhibitions, such as the story "Ich bin dein Mensch," a spin-off from the award-winning novel Die Nacht war bleich, die Lichter blinkten (2019), which was nominated for the German Science Fiction Award and was made into a film. She published her fifth novel, Erdling, in November 2023. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
During her residency, Emma Braslavsky will be working on her novel Gummi (Rubber), which tells Charles Goodyear's vision of the future from the perspective of his two wives, Clarissa Beecher Goodyear and Fanny Wardell Goodyear, thereby putting them and his family front and center. Through this shift in perspective, she hopes to uncover a new facet of what the future is made of. In the U.S., she is currently planning her research on the two women whose influence on her husband's success has so far gone unnoticed.
Biliana Voutchkova is a thoroughly engaged interdisciplinary artist, violinist, composer-performer, improviser, and curator working internationally as a soloist and in collaboration with renowned artists. She is a faculty member of the Bern Academy of Arts (HKB) and founder and curator of the DARA String Festival. Through the prism of listening, she explores states of spontaneity and intuitive resonance embodied in her multifaceted activities. These include concert performances of improvisation, contemporary composition, and original/site-specific work, exhibitions, long durational and multidisciplinary performances, audiovisual works, and installation formats with a focus on the interconnection between inner world and sound space.
During her residency Biliana will work on two projects directly connected to Villa Aurora and the city of Los Angeles: One will be the collection of audiovisual material and the creation of sound portraits from the different indoor/outdoor spaces at Villa Aurora and the hills and mountains in the greater Los Angeles Area. The other one will be an investigation of the timbral qualities of Villa Aurora’s pipe organ.
Joram Schön, born and raised in Berlin-Moabit, is an artist and filmmaker. He studied fine arts at UdK Berlin in the class of Thomas Zipp. He has participated in several group, duo, and solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad. In his drawings he combines nature and urban observations. He preserves urban change in his critical questions about topographies and architecture. He is currently doing his master's degree at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KMH), combining the mediums of drawing and filmmaking to realize autobiographical short stories.
For his residency, Joram Schön plans to realize two chapters of his film essay The Journey of Abu J. – from Dönninghaus to the Sinai in Los Angeles. His cinematic-narrative essay explores the limits and possibilities of Western-style burial culture, taking thematic detours along the way.
Joram Schön is a Villa Aurora Fellow courtesy of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.
Fern Liberty Kallenbach Campbell, born in New York, grew up in Berlin, and lives and works in Halle (Saale). She studied communication design at Burg Giebichenstein and completed her bachelor's degree in 2021 with a focus on illustration in the class of Prof. Georg Barber. In 2023 she completed her diploma in textile art in the class of Prof. Caroline Achaintre. Fern processes her personal and digital reality in the form of tapestries. Here, the boundaries between good and evil become blurred, as well as the boundaries between self-medication and addiction, chaos and harmony. The dining table is a recurring element in her works.
Fern Liberty Kallenbach Campbell is Villa Aurora Fellow of the Art Foundation of the State of Saxony-Anhalt.
Parking information:
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting at 4:00 pm.
My Mother's Courage: Play by George Tabori with Thomas Bockelmann and Sigrun Schneider-Kaethner
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Information
George Tabori’s intimate two-character play “My Mother’s Courage” is shown for the first time in Los Angeles! Tabori, a Hungarian Jew, moved 1947 to Los Angeles where he became a script writer and part of the exile literary scene that met regularly at Lion Feuchtwanger’s home. Brecht was among them who inspired Tabori towards the theater.
George Tabori’s homage to his mother is, by extension, homage to all mothers whose courage, wit, and will to live gave their children the opportunity to come to terms with their own trauma. The ripple effects of the European cataclysms of the 20th century that destroyed generations are felt this very day, and the play is as relevant now with the world reeling in wars of aggression. The play was written in 1971 when he returned to Germany and premiered in 1979 at the Kammerspiele in Munich under Tabori’s own direction. While George Tabori’s works revolve around such issues as racism, Nazism, the Holocaust, and genocide, he uses satire, bold humor, and Brechtian theatrical techniques to sharpen the horrific absurdity of these political excrescences.
This production is a guest performance by the Staatstheater Kassel.
Actors
Sigrun Schneider-Kaethner, born in Posen and raised in Berlin, completed her training as an actor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Berlin. This was followed by engagements in Germany and Switzerland as well as touring theater guest performances in Scandinavia, Italy and Israel. Among others, she played in "Jacke wie Hose" (M. Karge) and "Kassandra" by Christa Wolf (authorized self-interpretation). Since 1995 she has appeared on stage with Thomas Bockelmann in "My Mother's Courage" by George Tabori. Schneider-Kaethner lives by Max Reinhardt's motto: "The actor is a person who has put his childhood in his pocket in order to keep on playing".
Thomas Bockelmann is a German actor and theater director born in Lüneburg and raised in Frankfurt. He was the artistic director of the Staatstheater Kassel for almost 20 years and directed over 80 plays. His production of My Mother's Courage by George Tabori has been performed more than 150 times. In 2022 it had its American premiere at the Torn Page Theater New York.
More Information
Shuttle service departs from Los Liones Drive & Sunset Boulevard starting at 4:00 pm.
Tour Dates Biliana Voutchkova
Los Angeles and North America
Biliana Voutchkova is a thoroughly engaged interdisciplinary artist, violinist, composer-performer, improviser, and curator working internationally as a soloist and in collaboration with renowned artists. She is a faculty member of the Bern Academy of Arts (HKB) and founder and curator of the DARA String Festival. Through the prism of listening, she explores states of spontaneity and intuitive resonance embodied in her multifaceted activities. These include concert performances of improvisation, contemporary composition, and original/site-specific work, exhibitions, long durational and multidisciplinary performances, audiovisual works, and installation formats with a focus on the interconnection between inner world and sound space.
CONCERTS IN LOS ANGELES
Concert at the Museum of Jurassic Technology
September 8, 7:30 p.m. (PT)
Composer and performer Biliana Voutchkova plays a new site specific solo at one of LA's most magical places. More information here
Concert at the Coaxial Arts Foundation: Inner Ear Energy Landscape
September 13, 8 p.m. (PT)
In this performance Biliana Voutchkova plays with Jessika Kenney and Austin Lee Larkin at the Coaxial Arts Foundation, a non-proft, multip-disciplinary media arts organization devoted to media, sound and performance art. More Information and tickets here
NORTH AMERICA TOUR DATES
September, 11: University of the Pacific, Stockton,CA / Masterclass and concert with Kyle Bruckmann
September, 12: UC Berkeley, CA / Masterclass and concert with Ken Ueno
September, 20: Constellation, Chicago, IL / Mixed groups with musicians from Instigation Festival and DARA Strings
September 21: Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago, IL / DARA Strings with Katinka Kleijn, Isidora Edwards, Gabby Fluke-Mogul and special guest Michael Zerang
September 22: AS220, Providence, RI / Small groups with Charmaine Lee, Bonnie Jones and Florence Wallis
September, 24: Goethe Institut Boston, MA / Solo and duo with Charmaine Lee
September, 25: Roulette, Brooklyn, NY / Solo and group set with DARA Strings / Joanna Mattrey, Miya Masaoka, Katinka Kleijn and Isidora Edwards
September, 27: Bard College, NY / Masterclass, in collaboration with Sarah Hennies
September, 28: Headlong, Philadelphia, PA / People Music’s Supply / Now is Now, duo with Isidora Edwards
I'M YOUR MAN - Film Screening and Discussion
Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
Join us for a screening of Maria Schrader's film I'M YOUR MAN (2021), followed by a discussion between author Emma Braslavsky and translator Holly Yanacek.
SCHEDULE:
6:00pm Doors open.
6:30pm Welcoming + Introduction
6:45pm Screening of I'M YOUR MAN + discussion w/ Author Emma Braslavsky + translator Holly Yanacek.
9:30pm End of Event
About the Book
Dr. Alma Felser is a famous couples therapist and one of the last people who still believes that love exists only between real humans. She rejects the comfort of hubot love. When her long-term relationship fails, she secretly orders herself one of these androids, naturally designed to be the ideal partner she always promotes in her articles. At first Alma is intoxicated, but soon she realizes that Tom is the partner she wants, but not the one she needs.
"In a compelling literary form, Emma Braslavsky […] asks to what extent the boundary between human thought and artificial intelligence is beginning to dissolve, especially in an era of radical individualism."
- Christoph Schröder - German TV Channel SWR
About the Film
Alma (Maren Eggert), an accomplished researcher at the famous Pergamon Museum in Berlin, leads a team studying ancient cuneiform writing. In order to obtain research funds for her work, she grudgingly agrees to participate in an extraordinary study, one in which she is an experimental variable: For three weeks, she must live with a humanoid android tailored specifically to her unique character and needs. But Alma is unsentimental and skeptical when she meets Tom (Dan Stevens), a robot almost totally indistinguishable from a flesh-and-blood man. Tom’s algorithm is programmed to learn from Alma, so that he may adapt and change to fulfill his programming to become her perfect partner. While he’s a technical marvel created solely to make her happy, his initial attempts are awkward and ridiculous, and Alma is horrified. But his constant analysis of Alma’s reactions allows him to adapt and cater to her real longings. I’m Your Man is a comically romantic tale about the questions of love, longing, and what makes us human.
Germany (2021), 108 min., German with English Subtitles
Director: Maria Schrader, Screenplay: Maria Schrader, Jan Schomburg, Emma Braslavsky, based on Braslavsky’s Die Nacht war bleich, die Lichter blinkten, Cinematography: Benedikt Neuenfels, Cast: Maren Eggert, Dan Stevens, Sandra Hüller, Hans Löw, Wolfgang Hübsch, Production Company: Letterbox Filmproduktion GmbH (Hamburg).
Participants
Emma Braslavsky is a writer, curator, and director. The meaning and future of humanity are her main topics. She has published multiple award-winning novels, audio art, art works, and exhibitions, such as the story "Ich bin dein Mensch," a spin-off from the award-winning novel Die Nacht war bleich, die Lichter blinkten (2019), which was nominated for the German Science Fiction Award and was made into a film. She published her fifth novel ,Erdling, in November 2023. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
During her residency, Emma Braslavsky will be working on her novel Gummi (Rubber), which tells Charles Goodyear's vision of the future from the perspective of his two wives, Clarissa Beecher Goodyear and Fanny Wardell Goodyear, thereby putting them and his family front and center. Through this shift in perspective, she hopes to uncover a new facet of what the future is made of. In the U.S., she is currently planning her research on the two women whose influence on her husband's success has so far gone unnoticed.
Dr. Holly Yanacek is associate professor of German at James Madison University. Her scholarship in German literary studies focuses on emotion, narration, gender, care, and posthumanism. She is a former Fulbrighter who still has a metaphorical suitcase in Berlin. Words Without Borders has published her first literary translation of Emma Braslavsky’s short story „The VANISHÄVEN Furniture System: A Demonstration"
More Information
LOCATION:
Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
1901 W. 7th St. Suite AB,
Los Angeles, CA 90057
Attendance to this event is free and open to the public.
Partner
An event in collaboration with our partner institution Thomas Mann House and the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles.
Concert: Ensemble Apparat plays compositions by Stefan Beyer & Michelle Lou
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Information
The Ensemble Apparat, which focuses on brass instruments in the context of New Music and Sound Art, will be performing at Villa Aurora. It will play compositions by Michelle Lou (San Diego) and Mattie Barbier (Los Angeles) as well as former Villa Aurora Fellows Hanna Hartmann and Stefan Beyer.
The focus of Ensemble Apparat is on expanding the horizons of brass instruments in the context of new music and sound art. The members of Ensemble Apparat - Mathilde Conley and Paul Hübner (trumpet), Samuel Stoll (horn), Weston Olencki (trombone), and Max Murray (tuba) - have already gained extensive experience in renowned New Music ensembles (including Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, MusikFabrik Köln, Collegium Novum Zürich, Ensemble Tzara), played at the most important festivals on the scene (Donaueschinger Musiktage, Wittener Tage für Neue Musik, Huddersfield New Music Festival, Warschauer Herbst, Wien Modern) and participated in important academies (Ensemble Modern Akademie, Lucerne Festival Akademie, Impuls Graz and Darmstädter Tage für Neue Musik). Since then, they have worked with numerous composers to try out a wide variety of styles and approaches in premieres of solo and ensemble works. This wealth of experience only comes together in Ensemble Apparat.
In recent years, the ensemble has presented programs at the rainy days festival of the Philharmonie Luxembourg, at the Akademie der Künste Berlin, and at the Klangwerkstatt Berlin festival. As part of the Ensemblekollektiv Berlin, Ensemble Apparat has performed at many important Berlin festivals for contemporary music, including Musikfest and MärzMusik of the Berliner Festspiele and Ultraschall.
Participants
Stefan Beyer is a Berlin-based composer of experimental music.
Born in Braunschweig, he studied composition, music and history in Leipzig and Gothenburg, Sweden. International appearances, e.g. with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra or the Ensemble Modern, as well as radio broadcasts on Deutschlandfunk Kultur and hr2 followed. Beyer has also received scholarships and grants from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and was a fellow at the artist residencies Villa Aurora, U.S.A., and the Cité internationale des Arts, Paris. From 2011 to 2013, he taught contemporary orchestration at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Academy of Music in Leipzig. He is a permanent contributor to the journal Musik & Ästhetik and chairman of the association for contemporary music and literature forma Leipzig e. V. Beyer is currently working on a new work for orchestra with the Brandenburg Symphony Orchestra 2025/26.
Michelle Lou is a composer, performer and sound artist who works mainly in the field of electroacoustic music, both in hardware and in computer based forms. She has also created large scale sound installations which are often performative and collaborative. Her work has been presented at Wien Modern, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, the Festival of New American Music and Kammer Klang in London. She received degrees in double bass performance and music composition from UC San Diego with additional studies at The Conservatorio G. Nicolini in Piacenza, Italy (double bass) and The UDK in Graz, Austria (composition), the latter on a Fulbright Fellowship. Graduate studies culminated in a doctorate in composition from Stanford University. Michelle Lou was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and an Elliott Carter Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has taught at the WasteLAnd Summer Composition Course, at the Academy for Neue Music in Boswil, Switzerland, and as a guest lecturer at Dartmouth College. Michelle Lou is currently a guest lecturer in composition and electronic music at UC Santa Cruz.
Parking Information
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting at 6:30 pm. Last shuttle to Villa Aurora leaves 15 minutes prior to the event.
Hybrid Reading with actress Sunnyi Melles and Constantin Wittgenstein in honor of Arnold Schönberg's 150th Birthday
Los Angeles
Art is not a question of ability, but of necessity
In celebration of the influential Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg’s 150th birthday the hybrid reading “Art is not a question of ability, but of necessity” will take place at Villa Aurora. The renowned actress Sunnyi Melles will read from contemporary documents to provide an insight into the composer's eventful life. Schönberg is considered a central figure of the Second Viennese School and revolutionized Western compositional techniques with his twelve-tone music. The program will be accompanied by video clips and sound design by Constantin Wittgenstein, son of Sunnyi Melles.
Participants
Sunnyi Melles, the Swiss film and theater actress, was born to Hungarian parents in Luxembourg. Her grandmother Lóth Ila was a silent film actress. Her father Carl Melles was a conductor and her mother, Judith Rohonczy, an actress. Her daughter Leonille Wittgenstein is also an actress. After her parents emigrated from Hungary in 1956, Sunnyi Melles grew up in Switzerland. At the age of 10, she was on stage with her mother at the Theater Basel. At the age of 14, she played her first film role, Rosa, alongside Max von Sydow in the movie Steppenwolf. She completed her acting school at the Otto Falkenberg School in Munich. In addition to engagements at the Munich Kammerspiele, the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna Burgtheater, she has appeared in films such as Hotel Adlon, Buddenbrooks, Narcissus and Goldmund and most recently in Triangle of Sadness and the mini-series Becoming Karl Lagerfeld.
Constantin Wittgenstein, born in Munich in 1994, is a passionate DJ and has been producing music for over 10 years. Wittgenstein began playing the piano at the age of five, followed by the drums at 13. He studied Creative Music Technology at London Metropolitan University. His music ranges from experimental music to house, dub and techno. His first LP Leonille was released in 2021 and his first single Don't Stop Looking in 2024. As a DJ, Wittgenstein plays clubs all over Europe, among others the Ministry of Sound, Brilliant Corners (London), Bob Beaman and Legal (Munich). Wittgenstein composed the music for "One Last Evening" (2023), directed by Lukas Natrath. He also accompanies readings with music, such as the Max Reinhardt readings at the New York Cultural Forum and the Anne Frank Graphic Diaries, which were performed at the Gasteig Cultural Center as part of the Jewish Artists Festival in Munich.
More Information
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting at 6:30 pm. Last shuttle to Villa Aurora leaves 15 minutes prior to the event.
Partners
This event takes place in cooperation with the Austrian Consulate General Los Angeles and the Arnold Schönberg Center Vienna
Film Screening + Discussion HARALD NAEGELI - The Zurich Sprayer
Goethe-Institut Los Angeles (1901 W. 7th St. Suite AB, Los Angeles, CA 90057)
Information
SCHEDULE:
6:30pm Doors open Welcoming + Introduction
7:00pm Welcoming + Screening of HARALD NAEGELI - The Zurich Sprayer
8:45pm Discussion with Nathalie David + Hector "HEX" Rios.
Participants
Harald Naegeli, born 1939 in Zurich, is the Zurich Sprayer. Convicted of causing criminal damage with his graffiti, he ran away to Germany where he received support from Joseph Beuys. In 1982, Switzerland issued an international arrest warrant against him and he subsequently spent 6 months in prison for his art. In 1984, he moved to Germany where he lived in exile for almost 20 years. He returned to Zurich in 2020 suffering from terminal cancer. During the Covid 19 lockdown, he sprayed more than 50 Dance of Death figures in the city. These Grim Reapers, he says, are his final answer, or the final utopia in his life for society. While the Canton of Zurich presses charges against him, the City of Zurich presents him with its annual City Art Award of 50 000 Swiss francs which he is donating to environmental and animal rights charities. Today Harald Naegeli is 84 years old. This film is an hommage to a great utopian.
Harald Naegeli - The Zurich Sprayer
Switzerland/Germany (20201, 97 min., Swiss German/German with English Subtitles
Writer-Director: Nathalie David, Idea: Peter Spoerri, Music: Andrina Bollinger, Cinematography: Adrian Stähli, Nathalie David, Editing: Nathalie David, Producers: Peter Spoerri, Nathalie David, Production Company: PS Film GmbH (Zürich)
Nathalie David, born in France, studied fine arts at the Villa Arson in Nice and the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, with subsequent additional studies at Pontus Hultén's Institut des Hautes Études in Paris and a fellowship at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Potsdam-Babelsberg. She sees the documentary perspective as a genre and a specific art process. Her work includes films, radio plays, photographs, and drawings. She lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin.
Nathalie David's project is a film about the poet, collector, architect, and patron of the arts Edward James, who lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1962 (from 1946 mostly as a visitor). There he was friends with, among others, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Ruth Ford, and Jack Larson, but he also socialized with Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Igor Stravinsky. In 1946 he moved to Mexico, where he spent 30 years building a unique ensemble of Surrealist architecture in collaboration with the indigenous population. The unrecognized grandson of Edward VII, he built the largest private collection of Surrealist art, beginning in 1933. Without his patronage, Surrealism would not have achieved the prominence it has today.
Selected Filmography
2022 | Video clip for “Ballade vom Sprayer” (Sophie Hunger)
2021 |Harald Naegeli – Der Sprayer von Zürich
2020 |Elias Crespin – L'Onde du Midi, with Valery Faidherbe, Musée du Louvre
Selected Prizes and Awards
2022 | Nominated for German Documentary Film Award forHarald Naegeli – Der Sprayer von Zürich
2021 | Nominated for Sichtwechsel Award at Filmfest Hamburg forHarald Naegeli – Der Sprayer von Zürich
2017 | Artist in Residence, Goethe-Institut, Porto Alegre, Brazil
Partner
Presented as part of the long-standing cooperation with the Villa Aurora, where Villa Aurora Fellows showcase their projects (past, present, and future) at the Goethe-Institut.
Lecture: Herbert Zipper and the "Lessons of Dachau"
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Information
The lecture “Herbert Zipper and the Lessons of Dachau” by Dr. Albrecht Dümling will be supplemented by short film clips, personal memories, and musical performances.
The conductor and composer Herbert Zipper (1904 - 1997) was a pioneer in the field of music education. When he discovered a deficit in arts education in U.S. schools, he helped start community arts programs. As a conductor of the Brooklyn Symphony he focused on school outreach programs and soon became the first executive director of the National Guild of Community Music Schools. He initiated and led the Music Center of the North Shore as a modern community music school that combined professional performances with high quality education and training for the younger generation. In 1972 he moved to Los Angeles where he continued his pioneering work. Programs developed by Zipper in California eventually evolved into the renowned Colburn School.
The great energy with which Zipper carried out this education work in the USA and Asia over several decades until his death can be traced back to his imprisonment in the German concentration camp Dachau in 1938. This shocking experience shaped his view of the potential impact of art, not least music.
Participants
Dr. Albrecht Dümling is a musicologist and music critic living in Berlin. After finishing his doctoral dissertation, he worked as a music critic for the Berlin newspaper “Der Tagesspiegel” (1978-1998) and the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (1999-2003). He is a contributor to the “Neue Musik-Zeitung” and several radio programs. In 1988 he created a critical reconstruction of the Nazi exhibition “Entartete Musik” (Degenerate Music, Düsseldorf 1938). As a Getty Scholar he curated a new version of this exhibition for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. Since 1990 Dümling is chairman of “musica reanimata“, a society for the promotion of composers persecuted by the Nazis, which in 2006 was awarded the German Critics’ Prizeand, to date, has organized more than 160 lecture concerts at the Konzerthaus Berlin.
His research focuses on music policy in the Nazi state and musicians in exile. In 2000-2004 Dümling conducted a research project on German-speaking refugee musicians in Australia. He is editor of the book series “Verdrängte Musik/Suppressed Music”. Other books focus on Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler, musical performing rights, Leon Jessel, Gideon Klein and Artur Schnabel. His latest publication tells the story of the Weintraubs Syncopators. For his activities Dümling was awarded in 2007 with the European Cultural Prize KAIROS of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation Hamburg and in 2021 with the Order of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Partner
This event takes place in collaboration with Colburn School.
Meet The Artists Q4
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
About the Artists
Viktoria Binschtok, born in Moscow, Russia, and raised in Germany, studied Photography and Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. She lives in Berlin. In her photographic works, Viktoria Binschtok deals with circulating images of our globalized world.
At Villa Aurora, Viktoria Binschtok wants to discover perspectives beyond the mediated reality in Los Angeles, a city known for its film and beauty industry.
Sharon Dodua Otoo is a novelist and political activist. Otoo won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 with the text Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin. Her first novel Adas Raum was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2021 and has been translated into several languages, including two English language versions Ada's Realm (MacLehose Press, 2023) and Ada's Room (Riverhead Books, 2023). In collaboration with the Ruhrfestspiele, one of the oldest, largest and most renowned theatre festivals in Europe, she curates the Black German-language literature festival "Resonanzen".
Pan Daijing, born in Guiyang, China, is an artist and composer who primarily engages with performance, installation, sound, and moving images. Drawing on the capacity of music to exceed the limits of language and distort the passage of time, Daijing’s work seeks to communicate physical, psychological, and sonic depths and to invoke a collective experience of solitude. Often realized as architectural interventions, her work pressurizes the boundaries between forms and between the alive and inanimate to create enveloping sensory environments.
As a composer with a background in avant-garde and noise music, the practice of Pan Daijing has centered around pain, trauma, and our innermost desires and fears through vulnerable and honest compositional approaches. During her residency at Villa Aurora, she aims to continue her work with a particular focus on furthering her research into opera as an art form and a mode of performance, and on accessing extremes of sound, emotion, and voice.
Nathalie David, born in France, studied fine arts at the Villa Arson in Nice and the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, with subsequent additional studies at Pontus Hultén's Institut des Hautes Études in Paris and a fellowship at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Potsdam-Babelsberg. She sees the documentary perspective as a genre and a specific art process. Her work includes films, radio plays, photographs, and drawings. She lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin.
Nathalie David's project is a film about the poet, collector, architect, and patron of the arts Edward James, who lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1962 (from 1946 mostly as a visitor). There he was friends with, among others, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Ruth Ford, and Jack Larson, but he also socialized with Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Igor Stravinsky. In 1946 he moved to Mexico, where he spent 30 years building a unique ensemble of Surrealist architecture in collaboration with the indigenous population. The unrecognized grandson of Edward VII, he built the largest private collection of Surrealist art, beginning in 1933. Without his patronage, Surrealism would not have achieved the prominence it has today.
Redwan Ahmed is an award-winning journalist based in Bangladesh, renowned for his coverage of the Rohingya refugee crisis, human rights violations, and Bangladeshi politics. He was honored with the 22nd Human Rights Press Award for his work on the Rohingya crisis with Agence France-Presse, alongside fellow AFP journalists.
His investigative work for The Guardian exposed the exploitation of Bangladeshi garment factory workers.
In addition to his reporting, Redwan co-founded the “Bangladeshi Journalists in International Media” alliance, dedicated to supporting and protecting local journalists. His contributions to journalism and press freedom earned him a place in Forbes’ 2024 Asia class of “30 Under 30,” making him the first and only Bangladeshi journalist to receive this recognition.
Redwan was also awarded the United Nations' Reham Al-Farra Memorial Journalism Fellowship in 2021 and 2023, where he gained extensive knowledge and training on the global implementation of SDGs, international refugee crises, and the climate crisis. He remains committed to advancing press freedom and improving freedom of expression in Bangladesh.
Salwa Aleryani, born in Sana'a, Yemen, is a visual artist working primarily with sculpture and installation. Through constellations of made and found objects, her work engages with places and infrastructures as well as their historical backgrounds, potentials, and promises. In recent years, she has exhibited at Kunstverein Freiburg, Skulpturenpark Berlin, MMAG Amman, and Savvy Contemporary Berlin, among others. She lives and works in Berlin.
Salwa Aleryani's project follows in the footsteps of artist Pacita Abad, a Filipina and self-defined woman of color who created work across many countries, often incorporating different crafts and cultures to reflect on societal issues. In 1988, Abad spent several weeks in Yemen, where she traveled extensively. Fascinated by the vernacular architecture, she dedicated a large body of work to her journey. In Los Angeles, Salwa plans to collaborate with the Pacita Abad Art Estate to learn more about this work and her time in Yemen.
Salwa Aleryani is Villa Aurora Fellow of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Parking information:
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting at 3:00 pm.
An Evening with Sharon Dodua Otoo
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Information
We regret to inform you that due to the ongoing Franklin fire in Malibu, we decided to cancel the event with Sharon Dodua Otoo and Robert Blankenship scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, December 12th.
While Villa Aurora is not directly impacted by the fire at this time, our location is in close proximity to the evacuation zone and the safety risks make it unfeasible to proceed with the event as planned.
However, Sharon Dodua Otoo and Robert Blankenship will still hold their conversation, which will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel at a later date.
We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to see you soon at one of our next events!
Participants
Sharon Dodua Otoo is a novelist and political activist. Otoo won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 with the text Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin. Her first novel Adas Raum was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2021 and has been translated into several languages, including two English language versions Ada's Realm (MacLehose Press, 2023) and Ada's Room(Riverhead Books, 2023). In collaboration with the Ruhrfestspiele, one of the oldest, largest and most renowned theatre festivals in Europe, she curates the Black German-language literature festival "Resonanzen".
Robert Blankenship is Associate Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach, where he is program director and graduate advisor for German and teaches courses on topics such as the literature of divided Germany; contemporary German literature; German cinema; and Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. He is author of the monograph Suicide in East German Literature: Fiction, Rhetoric, and the Self-Destruction of Literary Heritage and is currently working on a second book tentatively titled Construing Christa Wolf: Critical and Creative Responses. At CSULB, he also directs the Christa Wolf Lab, which is a collective of radical readers who mine the works of Wolf for inspiration regarding collaborative reading practices.