Dissident Stories between GDR and pOstdeutschland #1

Book Launch wild recuperations. material from below and program
in the exhibition Turnen/Gymnastics: A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures

8 December 3 – 8 pm

Haus 7 (5th & 6th floor) Campus für Demokratie, Haus 7
Ruschestraße 103, 10365 Berlin-Lichtenberg

PROGRAM

3 pm Exhibition Opening: Turnen/Gymnastics: A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures
A site-specific exhibition about dissident bodies in the former gymnastics hall of the Stasi by Elske Rosenfeld, with works of Gabriele Stötzer, Wolfgang Scholz and Elske Rosenfeld in an installation by Andrea Pichl, organised by Archive Books
Introduction by Andrea Pichl and Elske Rosenfeld*

4 – 5.30 pm Eastgerman Undergroundsound 1979-1990 and “Legeparty”
Punkrock, Postpunk and kin sounds – a musical commentary to wild recuperation. material from below by Henryk Gericke, author and curator of the exhibition ostPUNK! – too much future
& collective Samizdat-stapling session with the 1989 samizdat URKUNDE – 40 Years of the GDR guided by artists Anna Zett*

5.30 pm Book Presentation wild recuperations. material from below*
Dissident Stories between GDR and pOstdeutschland #1
with the archivists, contributors, editors and publishers
Contributions by Alex Gerbaulet + Mareike Bernien, Anna Zett, Elsa Westreicher, Elske Rosenfeld, Ernest Ah + Sabrina Saase + Lee Stevens of the Raumerweiterungshalle Collective, Irena Kukutz, Nadia Tsulukidze, Peggy Piesche, Samirah Kenawi, Suza Husse + Ina Röder Sissoko, Technosekte + Henrike Naumann; and conversations with Katalin Cseh-Varga, Maria Josephina Bengan Making, Rebecca Hernandez García, Redi Koobak, Sebastian Pflugbeil, Tim Eisenlohr; Edited by Elske Rosenfeld und Suza Husse

6.30 pm Conversation about Black feminism and antifascist self-organisation between GDR and pOstdeutschland*
with Ina Röder Sissoko, active in the women*s and lesbian movements of the GDR and, from 1989, in the Black feminist movement in Germany

*Conversations in German language

About the book
wildes wiederholen. material from below.
Dissident Stories between GDR and pOstdeutschland #1

Dissident practices and sociabilities of the late GDR unfolded in a present that was largely detached from any utopian future. Their traces are alive in the memory of those involved in the cultural and political underground at the time and in numerous materials and documents at archives and collections. wild recuperations. material from below follows a shared desire to bring these experiences and environments from below into a meaningful and complex dialogue with the politics of the present. Drawing on current artistic and critical forms of working with archives and memory, the book gathers a plurality of approaches to the fabric of absence and of possibility that the Archive of the GDR Opposition aggregates. The positions from which histories are experienced, desired and told – their situatedness in bodies, languages and ecologies – are part of each story.

A District*School without Center and Archive Books publication in collaboration with the Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft / Archive of the GDR-Opposition. This book inaugurates the series Dissident Stories between GDR and pOstdeutschland. Book and program are funded by the Berliner Beauftragten zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur.

The exhibition

Turnen/Gymnastics: A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures is on view from 8 to 18 December 2019. Supported by Haupstadtkulturfonds. For more information see http://www.archivekabinett.org