A collaborative poetry performance by Mihret Kebede and Rike Scheffler, this work was inspired by the distance between the poets’ countries. The two poets, one from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the other from Berlin, Germany, will attempt to find a path to each other within and through David Chipperfield’s exhibition Sticks and Stones, employing this exercise as a metaphor for the woods of politics and identities we must to overcome in order to meet others.
Accompanied by Simon Bauer on harp and Claudio Puntin on the clarinet, the poets will be communicating through poems, language, movement, and music, taking the audience along with them, leaving their imprints and footprints in the woods, tying traces and shoelaces, words and music together – in short, by making a knot: a symbol of connection, an action of entities, and a symbol of their different positions becoming intertwined.
WORDS THAT HURT is a 3-part poetry intervention, inspired by the eponymous rhyme of David Chipperfield’s exhibition: “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. Writers and artists working with words that do hurt will test the meaning, weight and impact of their words. Each part of this intervention, curated by Rike Scheffler, aims to explore both the potentials and the limits of words and language, letting them interact with graphics (part 1), sounds (part 2), and bodies (part 3). These interventions examine how words shape our political, physical, and emotional realities, and how they disrupt or soothe our minds and beings.
We do have to warn you: you (and some of the words you know) might get hurt.
As part of Acting Archives funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation
