Poetry reading: Cornelia Hülmbauer & Ricardo Domeneck

Cornelia Hülmbauer (1982, Austria) writes poetry, short prose and radio plays. Her poems are emotionally charged, with sentences that seek the precise words to express something intangible, and generally ominous. Searching language, simple, featuring dialect and references to folk songs and counting rhymes; her sentences appear mainly to show how difficult it is to say things accurately. This is a serious task when it comes to the gulf between remembering and forgetting, or the harm people do to each other. Often, an ‘I’ will address a ‘you’ in a conversation that hints at wider engagement, like the imbalance in male-female relations. A fine example of this is the series Zyklus V, which is above all about the female body in the social space, and about the female voice in our society. Poems are often set in families, a context that is comforting, but is also infected by secrets and domestic violence. Threat combined with cool humour make for work that is multi-layered and full of surprises.

Ricardo Domeneck (1977, Brazil) is one of today’s most prolific and versatile Brazilian poets. He nimbly switches between media, from collection or book to video, performance, music and visual arts. Domeneck describes himself as ‘an author from São Paulo, living in Berlin’, thus expressing his critical attitude to his homeland, which systematically and deliberately makes life difficult for the indigenous population of Brazil. At the same time, it distances him from Brazilian literature, which overlooks female authors and writers of colour. Domeneck is a sorcerer, a poet who maximises the power of his language. Philosophy and history blend with banal corporality and mundane observations in his glittering, almost tangible language. Domeneck’s poetry constantly pushes artificial boundaries and strains colonial reference frameworks, as well as normative attitudes to sexuality. Domeneck is particularly interested in the male body, whose delights he associates both tonally and thematically with the eroticism of language and the act of writing itself. In 2015 Perdu Amsterdam published a selection of his work in Dutch translation by Bart Vonck, with the title Het verzamelde lichaam (The Collected Body).

Host: Elfie Tromp