About the production

Start

7:30 p.m.

End

9 p.m.

The essays in Judith Schalansky’s latest book, »Marble, Mercury, Mist. What the World Is Made Of«, are masterpieces of intellectual agility. The author links minute details to broader contexts. She approaches the natural sciences with poetry, and the diffuse with clarity. She takes three materials in three different states of matter – namely marble, mercury and fog – as the starting point for fascinatingly idiosyncratic reflections on the world, perception and art. The author boldly transcends genre boundaries to let us share in the associative streams of thought in her sparkling essays.

Her latest writings form the starting point for this evening, which is intended to meander between conversation and reading. In conversation with Thoralf Czichon, the young literary YouTuber (»LiteraturNews«) and, since this season, literary dramaturg at the Lausitz Festival, we will experience a wordsmith, visual artist and spoken-word artist for whom books are fundamental repositories of human culture, media-bound time capsules and, moreover, visual and tactile works of art of great emotional value.

Schalansky, a trained book designer and, among other things, editor of the ‘Naturkunden’ book series published by Matthes & Seitz, grew up in the GDR. Whenever she wanted to travel as a child, she had to dream her way out into the wider world through books. Even today, from the cockpit of the library – her sacred research centre – she gazes holistically at our world as if through a compound eye, mapping remote places she herself will never visit (»Atlas of Remote Islands«) or tracing things that are lost and gone for good (»An Inventory of Losses«). Excerpt from possible topics of conversation: An encyclopaedia for the 21st century, the longing for undiscovered lands, daring artistic ideas, medieval seafaring, Greek mythology, the eroticism of fresh printing ink.