Literature

Beyond Utopias

In its second year the festival for new literature and sound „hoergeREDE“ is looking for visions and ways to combine Avant-garde and criticism. People who have seen life and have tested and tried everything there is in on this planet are still living in a world where it is always the same as it has been and where old hierarchical structures are returning well hidden behind masks of modernity, whereas in art the fight between traditional neo-conservatives and post-modernists is not anywhere near ending, start doubting all forms of utopia and vision; a strange mixture of self-determined enlightenment and resigned serenity occurs.

Although ten years have already passed in this millennium, it does not seem to be leading anywhere, as if people’s heads are full of emptiness: The disappearing of the idea of the perfect worlds, the legitimate scepticism regarding dogma and being heteronomous lets people jump into an open, stormy, waving sea. No isle of the blessed or a floating wooden board loaded with ancient moral values will help against the old storms of war and oppression, poverty and hunger and social injustice without prospect. The aftermath of the huge failure of communism 22 years ago is still an ongoing phenomenon that hits us in waves. The withdrawal from the ivory tower of the fine arts does not save us from those waves it just helps us drown.

Reason enough to look for possibilities to cross experimental forms of art: How to combine aesthetics and antagonism? How to get art off the fingers of market strategists? When does culture activity finally talk politics again? Has art lost its potential for rebellion? And why has no one responsible a problem with the gap between beautiful aesthetics and real life working conditions for the artists that is not getting smaller?

Is it fear of political art, which without art is no art, or is it fear of an outrage, which will lead to art without political messages?

Fact is, that there is an alternating relation between the artists, their works, theories and visions and the social, economical and political reality. Although an artist is generally more influenced by his/her time than the opposite, still: a perfect world of an autonomic, aware and at the same time socially responsible global player, only stays alive as long as the conflict of abstract beauty and resistant protest is unresolved.

The irrational sounds of music and the world abandoning sounds of poetry are having difficulties being political; although literature has language, discourse, meanings and words, and hearing without thinking is unimaginable. Without relying on the power of propaganda it is difficult to overcome the distance between artistic substance and influencing subversion. How to connect abstraction and advance, aesthetic and protest? Is this necessary? Is acting aesthetically a form of rebellion by itself in times of profit maximisation?

ELEVATE THE 21^st CENTURY

Framed by the basic theme of this years Elevate-Festival “Elevate the 21^st Century”, “hoergeREDE 11” the festival for new literature and sound shows the never-ebbing potential of literature and music, text and sound, of Avant-garde and criticism.

While others tremble in front of the terror of economy with its wide reach into all human life, awareness and acting domains, “hoergeREDE” delivers a literature programme of the Elevate, as festival in a festival, a new guaranteed non-mainstream lab for experiments.

Featured Artists

aiko aiko

Adnan Popovic