The German word Freiraum, literally translated, means free room. Freiraum is more than just physical space though, it is also a mental state of creativity and freedom. In 1929 Virginia Woolf argued for the necessity of a „room of one’s own“ for women writers: Freiraum, both literal and figurative, to think and to create. Almost a century later, having a private room is still a privilege, not only but especially for women. A virus knowing no boundaries or borders emphasized this inequality, making obvious the fierce competition for whose space is whose.
Which public does this public space belong to, what are its rules, and how are they policed? Unspoken questions that are revitalizing gated communities and exclusionary zoning around the world. Who gets to claim and define public spaces? Whose rules determine how space is used and shared? How does identity shape our experience of space?
Four international authors have taken part in the LCB’s digital residency programme in 2021 and have discussed and explored different notions of space in conversation and in writing. The digital residency is curated by Priya Basil and funded by the Federal Foreign Office.
Edited by Priya Basil
Room. Make or take?
On the politics and poetry of space
With texts by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Besufekad, Intan Paramaditha, Adania Shibli
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ISBN 978-3-948631-27-7
A publication of the Literary Colloquium Berlin with the kind support of the German Federal Foreign Office.
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© 2021 mikrotext, Berlin / the authors
Edited by Priya Basil
Room. Make or take?
On the politics and poetry of space
With texts by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Besufekad, Intan Paramaditha and Adania Shibli
Raum – room – in German, only needs a T, as a poetic-ontological prelude, in order to immediately become a dream – Traum. This is more than a beautiful, meaningful coincidence; it is a necessity. For is it not the case that every space which matters, which we wish-need-ought to enter, metaphysically or physically, every space worth contemplating-inhabiting-preserving has a dream-component? To create space, to make-share-claim space means, in a certain sense, to enable other visions of the world, to bring forth intermediate spaces – rooms that may open up the way towards something else.
The pandemic has evoked, or intensified, a profound questioning around ideas of space, movement, shelter, security; around what is private or public, individual or collective, national or planetary. What are the spaces you inhabit – whether you want to or not? The spaces which inhabit you – whether you know it or not? The spaces that form your habits, which affect other habitats?
Who gets to define-determine-dream space? How can different experiences, different insights about surviving-thriving-dying in different bodies and spaces become more visible-audible-understandable to more of us? What’s needed for everybody to move through the world freely-equally-justly? Where are there possibilities to identify-disrupt-transform longstanding structures of oppression and domination that take up so much room, that continuously try to squeeze out alternative thinking-dreaming-living models? What of the spaces, within us and without, ravaged by loss-absence-pain? And what is the place of silence; the silences of denial, or of the missing, the irretrievable?
Room is the second edition of a Digital Residency first established by the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB) in 2020 in response to the worldwide restrictions imposed by the pandemic. The residency aims to support possibilities for creating, connecting, sharing and belonging across all kinds of boundaries, through all kinds of challenges. In 2021, the LCB invited me to curate the project under the theme Room. I had the great pleasure and honour of selecting four fantastic writers to explore the notion of space in its widest sense.
Is literature the ultimate space? Of desiring-appearing-disappearing? Of loving? Might literature be a room no one owns, but where anyone can be as if it were all one’s own?
What is a reserve?
An affective opening to the world.
A place that makes everywhere else in a settler state possible.
What does that make me?
A child birthed from the ditch of history.
A simple explanation: The earth isn’t round. It is in the shape of a broken heart.
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Scrolling absent-mindedly through Twitter one morning, I came across a letter dated July 24, 1935 from the Office of the Indian Agent at Driftpile, Alberta.