Nina Dragičević (born 1984 in Nove mesto) is an experimental Slovenian poet, essayist, and sound artist. She gained recognition with her long poem Ljubav reče greva (Škuc 2019, Love Says Let’s Go). Her most recent publications of poetry are To telo, pokončno (Škuc 2021, This Body, Upright) and Ampak, kdo? (Škuc 2023, But, who?). In Dragičević’s texts that persistently revolve around questions of identity and the human body, breathless speech leads the reader from Marlen Haushofer to Virginia Woolf, Sam Shephard, and Jessica Lange in sequences of sentences without punctuation. Like a dictation from the unconscious, the lines are carried by this unique movement that moves through the work at a rapid pace: “to imagine a body therefore a horizon / a kaleidoscopic spectrum a potential / the spark of parallaxes everything assembling somewhere / supergravitational platform / bended and sliding / yet nothing to do with space universes and / similar lump sums of desires of estrangements / nothing to do with anything and with anybody and only then / to imagine it because of them and against them / let the fight commence.”

Kirils Ēcis (born 2000 in Riga) writes in Latvian and English, and lives in Vienna and Riga. In his artistic work, he transcends the boundaries of genre by combining language with sound, video, and sculpture. A selection of his poems has been published in the anthology for young Latvian poetry Kā pārvarēt niezi galvaskausā (Valters Dakša, 2020, roughly: How to Overcome an Itch in the Skull). In deceptively casual style, Ēcis’s poems recount the futile search for an attic flat where a tap drips, drops, drips to classical music; an ornithologist’s disappointment; or idiots searching in ponds for the source of their cumbersome subordinate clauses. Through the use of an unobtrusive dream logic, readers are subtly lead astray: “didn’t they tell you / if you get lost hum a song / repeat / if I get lost I hum a song.”

Kim Hyun’s (born 1980 in Cheorwon) debut Glory Hole, which was originally published in 2014, is South Korea’s first openly queer poetry collection. According to Park Sang Soo, it’s “a remarkable, first-of-its-kind achievement built upon extraordinary gay sensibility.” The collection gained fame outside the country’s borders when it was translated into English by Suhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan (Seagull Books 2022) for the publishing house’s Pride List, which makes international queer literature accessible to a wider audience. The book’s 51 prose poems are a wild mix of fan fiction, dystopian sci-fi, and annotated pornography, enriched with labyrinthine wordplay and metatextual references that lead to nowhere. Making guest appearances are the Merry Pranksters, Yukio Mishima, James Franco, Cate Blanchett and Montgomery Clift.

Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir (born 1987 in Reykjavik) is a poet, visual artist, composer, and singer in the electro pop trio aiYa. She is also the founder of the experimental poetry festival Suttungur. Her debut Eilífðarnón was published in 2019 and has since been translated into Swedish, English, and German. The German version Ewigzeit (2022), which was translated by Jón Thor Gíslason and Wolfgang Schiffer, was published by Elif Verlag. Sigurðardóttir’s poems are designed as a mystical road movie through time and space, situated between sleeping and waking. About Eilífðarnón (translated as Forevernoon in English), she says that it is about the art of existence. Falling into a trap and getting stuck between the past and the future. The author Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl writes: “Eilífðarnón is an instant classic of the Icelandic avant-garde.”

Moderation: Ricardo Domeneck

The event will be interpreted into English and German. With the kind support of ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen

Project management: Timo Berger