Sharp as a Story
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| 12 EUR, reduced 6 EUR |
| English |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
| Part of: Objects talk back |
Inspired by a walrus-ivory Story Knife from the Arctic region, Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza creates a multi-faceted new work that asks: what is remembered? How? For whom? The ephemeral strokes of a Story Knife were traditionally drawn by young girls into soil or snow to repeat old tales that would then blow off in the wind or melt away in the sun. Rivera Garza connects this empowering ancient Indigenous practice to the violentometro, a contemporary tool designed in Mexico to measure instances of intimate partner violence. The story of violence against women constantly disappears even as it is continuously told, re-told. Might a Story Knife play a role in reversing such erasure?
Cristina Rivera Garza is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose works explore the lightest and darkest passages of human experience with courage, grace and love. In her new creation for Humboldt Forum she boldly extends the scope of literature. Through performance, gesture, art and text, Rivera Garza, accompanied by artist Saúl Hernández, opens a profound space, an invitation, for collective memory and story.
Participants
Author, translator, critic. Recent publications include Liliana’s Invincible Summer (Hogarth, 2023), Pulitzer Prize Memoir 2024 and finalist for the National Book Award; El invencible verano de Liliana (PRH, 2021), Villaurrutia National Award, among others. Grieving. Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. by Sarah Booker (The Feminist Press, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 NBCC Awards in criticism. The Taiga Syndrome (Dorothy Project, 2016), translated by Aviva Kana and Jill Levine, Shirley Jackson Award 2018. Recent awards include: Jose Donoso International Literary Award, Chile 2021; Alfonso Reyes Nuevo León international Literary Award, Mexico 2021, among others. She is Hugh Rot and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and founder of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, Department of Hispanic Studies. MacArthur Fellow 2020-2025.
Saúl Hernández-Vargas. Visual artist. His most recent solo exhibitions includes Lo nuestro era un puro mirar ese objeto dorado (Our Thing Was a Steady Gaze on That Golden Object) at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo y de las Culturas de Oaxaca (MACCO) (Oaxaca, Mexico) and the Mineral Condition at the Jonathan Hopson Gallery (Houston, Texas, EEUU). He is a recipient of the Artadia Award (EEUU). He has been and artist in residency at the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands residency at Arizona State University, among others. In 2020, he developed Afilada Radio and co-curated No hay lengua humana que—a series of radio interventions for independent radio projects in Mexico. Te preparé humo (UNAM. 2019) is his first collection of essays. His publishing projects includes Surplus Ediciones (Sur+) and Yagular Magazine. Hernández-Vargas holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego and an Interdisciplinary PhD from the University of Houston.
Priya Basil is an author, and curator of the Humboldt Forum project Objects Talk Back. In her book Be My Guest/Gastfreundschaft (2019), she combines memoir, philosophy, food and politics in a reflection on hospitality in the broadest sense. Her most recent book Im Wir und Jetzt: Feministin Werden (2021) combines politics with the personal, as does her film essay on memory-culture and belonging, Locked In and Out (2020), which can be seen online.
Priya is co-founder and board member of WIR MACHEN DAS, an NGO that works with refugees and migrants for a more inclusive society. She is also a member of the advisory board of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. She has conceptualized and curated projects for various institutions including the Goethe Institut and International Literature Festival Berlin. From 2021 to 2023 Priya was International Writer in Residence for Mindscapes, a project of the Wellcome Trust UK, devoted to transforming how we understand, talk about and treat mental health. As part of this Priya undertook a research journey which spanned six continents to learn about different understandings of well being and practices of healing. In 2024, Priya was Writer in Residence for Canopy, Wellcome’s Climate and Health project. She is working on a new book which draws on her research and travels. In 2025/26 Priya is a fellow of the The Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation Käte Hamburger Kolleg based at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.