Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.
Julia Nitschke, DE
The School Non-Cyclopaedia – A Living Language Archive of the Classroom. Patchwork blanket with text Design: Lea Szramek Conceptual Consulting: Laura Strack.
Julia Nitschke works focuses on language, memory and archive. Using her German-Polish family biography as reference, she examines migration and queer perspectives in the PostOst context (a term referring to people who came to Europe or were born into families of people from the regions referred to as "former Eastern Bloc" and "post-Soviet countries". It implies not national borders, but common cultural, historical and social background). At the center of her series Non-Cyclopedia is language as a living, contradictory archive. It collects dialects, sociolects and marginalised languages, detaches them from their original context and reassembles them. Poetic texts, audio works, performances and digital formats are created in collaborative processes. Research, humour and collective remembrance are combined to create works that make language tangible as a social practice and collective memory.