Untie the World
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| 12 EUR, reduced 6 EUR |
| Please book your ticket in advance online or at the box office in the Foyer. |
| English |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
| Part of: Objects talk back |
The gold we throw into the lake, the gold that we take from the stone, that we melt and carve with our own hands. The gold for which others despair, for which they will bleed. We throw it so that dreams speak to us, so that the day does not grow weary and the plants grow aplenty. So that they may continue to sustain us.
Untie the World is a poetic essay that connects various objects made of plant fibres: from the Muisca raft that evokes the legend of El Dorado, to Amazonian flutes made of palm that can only be seen by men, to the sheet of paper used for museum records. Columbian writer Eliana Hernandez Pachon explores how these objects, from the Humboldt Forum collections, sustain different worlds. Through a text of changing voices and shifting forms, she shows how plants can reveal and conceal. She follows their clues, imagining connections between disparate worlds, lyrically mapping cycles of relation, all the while asking: what does it mean to preserve, to circulate, to let go?
Participants
Eliana Hernández-Pachón was born in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first book, The Brush, is an exquisite, aching work of historical reckoning. Through stories individual and collective, through people, elements, plants, she commemorates the massacre in the village of El Salado in February 2000 and thus speaks to the wider tragedy of mass murders in Colombia. The Brush received Colombia’s National Poetry Prize in 2020, making Hernández-Pachón the youngest poet to ever receive this honor. She is part of Como un lugar, a poetry collective that runs an independent press in Buenos Aires and organizes literary festivals in New York City and Latin America. She lives in Brooklyn.
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