Incontri al Corso 18 – Levin Westermann

 

INCONTRI AL CORSO 18 is a series of events in which the scholarship holders, who live and work in Via del Corso 18 for two months at a time, present their projects in an open dialogue with Gregor H. Lersch, Director of the Casa di Goethe, and the audience.

The poet Levin Westermann intends to lay the foundation in Rome for work on a new cycle of poems dealing with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, viewed through the lens of our present-day civilisation threatened by climate change and global warming. How would the Romans have reacted 2,000 years ago if they had been told that their world was coming to an end? The streets buried, the temples destroyed, 99% of all texts lost forever? How would we react? Against the backdrop of climate change and the dramatic changes it brings to life on Earth, the author is preoccupied with the themes of permanence and transience in connection with the topos of grief. Grief is seen here not as an individual reaction to the loss of a person, but as a collective phenomenon. It is about the work of mourning the measurable loss of species, ecosystems and landscapes in real time. Levin Westermann seeks to approach this theme through poetry, inspired by life and research in the “Eternal City”.

Levin Westermann (*1980) studied at the Hochschule der Künste Bern and lives as a freelance writer in Biel/Bienne. He writes poetry and occasionally prose. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Schweizer Literaturpreis, the Deutscher Preis für Nature Writing and the Basler Lyrikpreis. His most recent books, farbe komma dunkel (2021) and Zugunruhe (2024), were published by Matthes & Seitz Berlin.

With the kind support of

Rome – before, during and after Peter O. Chotjewitz

During his time in Rome, Radek Krolczyk follows in the footsteps of the German author, translator and lawyer Peter O. Chotjewitz, who spent time in Rome in various decades, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, then in the early 1990s, knowing various opposed German personalities, such as Andreas Baader and Ernst Jünger. In many literary works, Chotjewitz creates extraordinary portraits of the city and compares it with the previous decade. Now, 14 years after his death, Radek Krolczyk intends to update the image of his Rome.
The text will be published as a literary essay by Verbrecher Verlag Berlin, which is also in charge of Chotjewitz’s work.
The volume will be accompanied by a specifically produced photo series by Hannah Wolf (*1985).

Radek Krolczyk (*1978, Pyskowice, PL) is an author and gallery owner based in Bremen. He works on the political implications of aesthetics. He has been a lecturer at the HfK since 2014 and has taught art studies at the University of Bremen since 2019. In 2018, he was awarded the Art Criticism Prize of Art Cologne and the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Kunstvereine (ADKV). He is the owner of Galerie K’ in Bremen.

INCONTRI AL CORSO 18 is a series of events in which the scholarship holders, who live and work in Via del Corso 18 for two months, present their projects in an open conversation with Gregor H. Lersch, Director of Casa di Goethe, and the audience.

As part of her scholarship at the Casa di Goethe, literary scholar Sibylle Benninghoff-Lühl will follow Goethe’s botanical traces in Rome; Goethe speaks of his ‘botanical speculations’, as he describes them in the text ‘Italian Journey’ under ‘Rome, 2 December 1786’:
“… now began my botanical speculations, which I continued to indulge in the other day on a walk to Monte Mario, Villa Melini and Villa Madama. … The strawberry tree (arbutus unedo) is now flowering again as its last fruits ripen, and so the orange tree shows itself with blossoms, half and fully ripe fruits … There is enough to think about the cypress, the most respectable tree, when it is quite old and well grown. At the very least I will visit the botanical garden and hope to learn something there …”

The project focuses on Goethe’s description of trees, woods, flowers and leaves. It is a cultural and literary study of the traces that his diary-like travel notes lay out between literature and botany. Roaming through Rome, reading and leafing through the book of nature, the poet encourages the reader to reflect on a rhetoric of reading traces: his special collecting and archiving of flowers and leaves, literary shreds and shavings.
In Rome, the project also leads into concrete archives, above all the herbarium and the botanical garden. Here it becomes important what Goethe actually inspected, what he ‘speculated’, how and what he collected. The thematic arc is also drawn from Rome to Weimar when the project makes reference to Goethe’s natural history collection, especially his herbarium and his wood collection.

The event will take place in German language.

Dr Sibylle Benninghoff-Lühl (*1954 in the Lower Rhine region) is a literary and cultural scholar at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
She has been a visiting professor at several universities in Germany and abroad, including in Canada, Thailand and the Czech Republic.
Her current research interests lie at the interface of botany and literature as well as in the field of colonial literature and quotation research.

We would like to thank the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation for supporting the scholarship programme.

A new look at the architecture of Rome

INCONTRI AL CORSO 18 is a series of events in which the scholarship holders, who live and work in Via del Corso 18 for two months at a time, present their projects in an open dialogue with Gregor H. Lersch, Director of the Casa di Goethe, and the audience.

The scholarship holder Laura Helena Wurth will create a detailed radio feature in Rome about the influence of the architect Plautilla Bricci on the history and thus also on the legibility of Baroque Rome. Plautilla Bricci (Rome, 1616-1705) not only demonstrably erected buildings in the city, but also painted. In comparison to the architect Astra Zarina, who worked in Berlin in the 1960s, a parallel will be drawn and a new view of the city and who built for whom will be offered.

The event will be held in German language.

 

Laura Helena Wurth, born 1989 in Berlin, is an author and critic. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Art and Culture from Maastricht University and a Master’s degree from Humboldt University in Berlin. She writes regularly about contemporary art and architecture for the FAZ, FAS, NZZ and is an editor at Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She is co-founder of the project space FKA SIX, which addressed the topic of contemporary ruins in a shopping centre in 2023. Together with Louisa Hölker, she publishes the monothematic art magazine One to(o) Many, which unites many different voices into a single work of art.

We would like to thank the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation for supporting the scholarship programme.