unruly feelings

How should we deal with feelings of despair, anger, and grief in these catastrophic times – and what resistant potential lies within extreme emotional states?

Despair, rising up, turmoil, ah! – exclaims Heike Geißler’s lecture performance. She explores despair without hastily discarding or deflecting it. Instead, she advocates for a vigilant engagement with it: to emerge from it wide awake and demanding, and to find a way back into action. In collaboration with the artist Anna Lena von Helldorff, Heike Geißler invites the audience to a rally on the “Square of Desperate Feelings” – a dress rehearsal for protest.

But how do we cope when our own emotions are appropriated and smoothed over by late capitalism?
In her literary performance a real big place – set against the backdrop of the reality TV show Love is Blind – Jorinde Minna Markert negotiates the commercialization of romantic feelings. She reveals moments in popular dating formats that push or cross boundaries.

With Cakes of Despair, the artist duo Hilma Bäckström and Hedda Bauer enters the unruly readings, creating an obscure culinary space that, in turn, evokes entirely different, ambivalent feelings of consumption.

The event will be held in spoken German.