Mixed Media Reading | Six Days of Love
… of All the Ways We Continue to Weep and Love
hn. lyonga
hn. lyonga, … of All the Ways We Continue to Weep and Love, 2023.
… of All the Ways We Continue to Weep and Love (2023) is a mixed media reading in two acts by hn. lyonga, interdisciplinary writer, poet and the current Neighbour in Residence of the Gropius Bau. It invokes and introduces the practice of sweeping as a deliberate act of fortification that protects the body and its surroundings from the communal, historical and ecological insecurities it is exposed to.
A central motivator that pushes people towards sweeping is anxiety. As Neighbour in Residence, hn. lyonga turns to feelings of discomfort, as well as to energies entering the Gropius Bau due its specific architecture and history. The practice of sweeping works with the toughness and violent histories present in a space/place; to make it ready, soft and open to visiting energies and entities; to make it a site for people to gather and rally around.
In … of All the Ways We Continue to Weep and Love sweeping refers to the spiritual and traditional character of a practice hn. lyonga was taught as a child in Cameroon. The sound elements of the work also pay homage to the Bakweri people of southwest Cameroon and traditions of gathering at the foot of trees. It carries the voice of hn. lyonga’s mother and lullabies on the importance of trees, places of gathering and the people who do the laborious work of weaving, crafting and preserving narratives.
The public programme Six Days of Love follows the trajectory in How Love Moves: Prelude with a series of cinematic readings, conversational formats and workshops between summer 2023 and spring 2024. In intimate settings at the freely accessible areas of the Gropius Bau and the cinema, Six Days of Love invites visitors to turn to love as a field of signs beyond the normative mould, through the lens of poetry and the cinematic. The programme brings together different vantage points of writers, scientists, artists and musicians, drawing from a poem by author and activist bell hooks published in When Angels Speak of Love (2005), circling around love as a planetary language premised on minuscule and monumental aspects of the body and the worlds it inhabits.
Details
Lullabies and Singing: hardeson lolita
Sound Dramaturgy: MarkusPosse
Sound: Hanita Firoozmand, hn.lyonga, Markus Posse
hn. lyonga is a Black, Queer, interdisciplinary writer, poet and currently the Neighbour in Residence at the Gropius Bau.
“I live and work in Berlin and have lived in other places – still present in my body, my writings and in my life in the diaspora. I have not come or arrived here on my own; I have arrived on the shoulders of others. My work focuses on writing, storytelling, community, ways of being and existing in space and migrational inquiries pertinent to historically colonised and marginalised communities. Among other things, I am a neighbour, a (livelong) student, a founding member of the Black Student Union at Humboldt University, Berlin, a member of the curatorial board of BARAZANI.berlin – Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand, and a member of the Field Narratives Collective, working on ideas of rural biographies, transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling. My work qualifies as ‘Wake Work’: a labour within the space of paradoxes surrounding Black citizenship; it is also the work of ‘continuous inhabiting and rupturing of episteme.’ (Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, 2016).”
hardeson lolita is a certified Dementia caregiver, mother, and grandmother. In another life, hardeson lolita was an Elementary school educator, business owner and contractor for CDC. She is born and raised in the southwest regions of Cameroon and is currently based in Duisburg.
“I find community in women – in those women whose stories society turns away from, in the stories of mothers, sisters, etc., who have relinquished and laid to rest that which they were to raise their children. Women who have traveled far but never fully arrived at something they recognise as home but have decided to make some sort of life between star-shine and clay. Alas, I am here, living, respiring, daydreaming. This is the woman I am with hands steeped in textiles and textures, a rememberer and keeper of histories, traditions, songs, lullabies and recipes, witnessing life yesterday, today and tomorrow.”
Markus Posse is a performance artist and researcher. After graduating from Performance Studies, he worked as a dramaturg and artistic collaborator at spaces such as Deutsches SchauSpielHaus Hamburg, Theater Dortmund, Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, and so forth. In addition, he is currently finishing his training to become a Drama Therapist.
“My work centers around the body as an agent of (micro)violence. I am seeking to develop modes of artistic reflection that enable us to experience and subvert the physical archives within our subconscious. The gestures that really matter – to me – are the ones that we are not yet calling a gesture. This paradox informs my practice. Other than that, I am interested in neurodiversity and the coverage of different kinds of perception within the artistic sector.”