Poems offer an excellent starting point for engaging with text through illustration. Vivid language, suggestion, and atmospheric condensation challenge participants to develop their own perspectives, translate mental content visually, clarify, interpret, contrast, or ironically inflect existing material.

The study group particularly focuses on exploring the interplay between self-written lyrical texts and participants’ own illustrations. Sometimes the illustration follows the text, sometimes the text follows the illustration, and sometimes both are developed simultaneously in conceptual preliminary considerations.

With its exhibitions and the Centre for Artists’ Publications, the Weserburg offers an inspiring environment and diverse stimuli for writing and illustration exercises.

Detailed course information and registration: info@ankebaer.de

Far more than many realize, we are often constrained by “invisible” normative assumptions—about the “right way” to live (heteronormativity) as well as the “right way” to write.

The four open sessions of Queer Writing – Against the Norm! (29 March, 7 June, 23 August, and 25 October, 1–5 pm each) invite participants to question and subvert these norms through writing and to discover writing as an empowering and resistant form of expression. Participants may contribute to a queer alphabet (“Queer from A to Z”) or pursue other impulses. There will be time for exchange, readings, questions, and support. Inspiration can also be drawn from the Weserburg itself, including works from the collection exhibition So as We Are, from Murat Önen’s Moving Pile under the Blue Sky (2022) to Zoe Leonard’s queer-political manifesto I want a president (1992).

The workshops are led by queer Bremen-based author Jutta Reichelt and are open to all queer persons, regardless of background or writing experience. Participation is possible on one or multiple dates without prior registration.

A cooperation between Literaturhaus Bremen, Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Queeraspora e.V., Stadtbibliothek Bremen, and Rat&Tat–Zentrum für queeres Leben.

Fig.: Jutta Reichelt, photo: Dorothea Salzmann-Schimkus