PROGRAM of GOETHE MORPH*ICELAND 2nd-15th September

HOW WE ALWAYS WANTED TO HAVE LIVED
Welcome & Morph with us!

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Artists, artistic collectives, thinkers and activists from Iceland, Germany, Kenya, Mali, Syria, Greenland and Poland have been asked to engage with the theme throughout Spring and Summer of 2022. The growing body of thoughts and ideas will coalesce from 5th to 15th of September in Reykjavík, when the results of their explorations will be presented to a wide audience in a holistic program – on site and digitally, at the Nordic House Reykjavík, as well as in schools and in the outdoors.

Poetic reflections on the body as a political, cultural, and social oracle will merge with future-archaeological, transmigratory, decolonizing, and queer visions of history, nature, time and (im-) materiality. Goethe Morph* Iceland becoming a recalibration of common knowledge and an invitation to all of us to actively shape the morphology of our lives.

We attempt to celebrate poetic and activist glimpses that orbit the question of ‘how we always wanted to have lived’. We hope to tap into the preconscious domain of the living mind, the matrix of yet unarticulated ideas from art, philosophy, and life in between. Together with artists, thinkers, and doers, we invite everyone to come together and imagine an alternative morphology of living. Because envisioning a world beyond catastrophe, beyond today’s toxic cocktail of status quo and eruptive turmoil, is difficult. We hope not to simply end up in the domain of fairy-tale escapism. To paraphrase the words of Walter Benjamin, for the sake of those without hope that hope is given.

Goethe Morph* Iceland: How we always wanted to have lived is a trans-cultural initiative of the Goethe-Institut in cooperation with The Nordic House, Reykjavík. Curated by Arnbjörg María Danielsen and Thomas Schaupp.