Hans Jörg Rheinberger and Julia Cimafiejeva read from their poetry collections
*Augenmerk* is the most comprehensive collection of poems to date by the author Hans Jörg Rheinberger. The new poems form a grand parade of scholars that he parades before the eyes of literature lovers. He engages with the greats of literature and with prominent scientists and artists such as Balzac, Breughel, Cassirer, Cézanne, Darwin, M. C. Escher, Horace, Lévi-Strauss, Kleist, Mayakovsky, Rembrandt, Rilke, Serres, van Gogh, and Robert Walser. “We still have to learn the language of the clouds,” says the author. In the poetry cycle “Village Thoughts,” he repeatedly wanders back to his youth, which he spent in Vaduz. At the end of this collection of poems is the open-ended question: “What do we really know about the mysteries of ecology?”
What remains when a life is torn from its familiar order? The Belarusian poet and translator Julia Cimafiejeva left her home country in 2020 for political reasons. In Hamburg in 2024, she began creating paper collages; what started as play became serious, and the cutouts became metaphors. The collages, assembled from old books and magazines, piece together a new world in absurd compositions. They are accompanied by short poems that offer no explanations, only clues—poetic hints at a fragmented identity in search of new meaning. A personal and artistically compelling work about exile, loss, and the fragile act of piecing together one’s own story.
Moderator: Gregor Dotzauer
