co-funded by the EACEA Creative Europe programme (smaller scale cooperation projects)
with the kind support of the Alp-Adriatic Alliance
ALARM! The evening commenced with a reception, followed by a podium discussion between Dragica Rajcic, Johann Pätzold and Sandra Kocuvan, hosted by Colette Schmidt, a cultural journalist who writes for the Austrian Der Standard and lives in Vienna. She also specializes in reporting on far-right extremist movements, human rights and the politics and culture of remembrance.
Dragica Rajcic is a Croatian poet and thinker who lives between Austria, Switzerland and Croatia. She writes in the German she learned when she moved to Switzerland; the title of her first published volume of poetry reflects the linguistic and semantic background: Halbgedichte einer Gastfrau. Her work moves intellectually in the frictional space between syntax and semantics, between the expected and the other, between foreignness and the concept of home. Her partially autobiographical writing illuminates the concept of the generality that can grow out of an own trajectory and the shared elements inherent in individuality.
Johann Pätzold is a musician and composer and an active member of Sea-Eye, an organisation dedicated to saving migrants from the Mediterranean sea. He worked on a lifeboat and recently published a number of statements online, answering questions posed to him during and after his time at sea. His stories and language reflect the potential brutality in our societies and nonetheless shine with the hope of an absolute imperative amongst some of us to help those less fortunate than ourselves.
Sandra Kocuvan is an EU project advisor and represents the cultural department of the Austrian state of Styria in its external and foreign relations. She is also a member of the Alp-Adriatic Alliance committee.
Following the live conversation and audience conversations, there was a series of musical performances covering a range of genres by Istrian singer Tamara Obravac with Slovenian guitarist Uroš Rakovec, Hungarian composer and media artist Tibor Szemzö, Slovenian accordionist Juri Tore, clarinettist and electronic musician Roberto Paci Dalo, a trio performance by Benjamin Finger, Mia Zabelka and Zahra Mani, Balkan folk music radically revisited by Darla Smoking and a new take on Istrian close-harmony singing by Goran Farkas and Myriam de Bonte.
schormani 