Akademie der Künste der Welt, Unglossary, Book, 2018

The artist group Bik Van der Pol, and their workshop series is called The City & The City referring to China Miéville’s book in which two cities occupy much of the same geographical space, but via the volition of their citizens, they are perceived as two different cities.

The workshops invite participants to navigate the city in all its complexity to explore new forms of collaboration around writing, storytelling, mapping, and editing as in a collective research. The research is taking place against the backdrop of the elections for North-Rhine Westfalia’s state legislature in May 2017 and the federal parliamentary elections in September 2017. Participants will discuss questions raised by voting and voicing as a political act in public space.

Who has access, which languages do we speak? Encounters, interviews and documents of printed- and non-printed matter/media will be actively taken into account as forms of storytelling that may become alternatives to revealing how private bodies become political, how they participate, and how they are drawn into relations of solidarity or opposition.

At the end of the workshop phase in fall 2017 there will be a publication as well as a performative presentation of the results through a collaboratively designed event. For several sessions there will be experts in the field of publishing and editing invited. Experience or invested interest in writing, editing, theatre, working with printed matter and/or social media, or theatrical experience, as forms of making public is recommended.