Whose House is This?

A literary relay with readings on the festival theme 'Whose House is This?'. The festival authors are blowing a strong wind through the homes of the family, society and literature!

Information

Date and time Friday 17 June 2022 19:30 tot 20:45 uur
Location Paard Grote zaal
Price 29,50
15,- (CJP, Students, Ooievaarspas)

A literary relay with Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Neske Beks, Aafke Romeijn, Rebecca Solnit (online), Robin Block, Pola Oloixarac et al.

Whose House is This? is Winternachten 2022's festival theme. In this event, we presented an exciting relay of readings and music, in which our festival authors put their own spin on the theme. Together they breathed new life into the house of family, society and literature.

All angles of the four-day Winternachten Festival were covered in Whose House is This? during a colourful parade of authors and performers. Various voices gave completely different answers to the great question underlying the festival. We listened to stories about being at home, to critical stories about the institutions to which we are subject, to cozy stories built on a solid foundation, and much more.

Author and artist Neske Beks got her teeth into our theme (and the question is what was left over); author Pola Oloixarac let us in on the fun of Mona, a parody of the literary world; multitalent Aafke Romeijn treated us to music; and writer and activist Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me) came home to us on the podium all the way from the United States.

English spoken.

Line-up

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

(USA, 1991) is seen as an important new voice in American literature: that of new black surrealism. His debut  collection Friday Black won many prizes and is a raw, surrealist and partly satirical book with twelve short stories that denounce the excesses of racism and today's consumer society. Five unarmed black teenagers are murdered in cold blood by a white family man who feels "threatened" by them - and who is acquitted; an amusement park employee does his makeup for yet another day as scapegoat and target of the racist fantasies of the mostly white visitors; and a salesperson in a shopping mall prepares for the Black Friday sales and the expected hordes of zombie-like, violent bargain hunters. Adjei-Brenyah's stories are extreme and disturbing, but at the same time sketch a nearly-here future and show how people desperately want to belong to a society, but that this society is not ready to accept just anyone. A Dutch translation with the same title was published in 2019.
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Neske Beks

(Belgium, 1972) is a writer, transdisciplinary artist and a film and theatre maker. She debuted with De Kleenex Kronieken (The Kleenex Chronicles, 2014), a family and village chronicle featuring Priscilla, the daughter of a Flemish father and a Senegalese mother. She published the children's book Sala & Monk in 2020. In Echo - essays, speeches en brieven (Echo - essays, speeches and letters, 2021), named after the poem Echoes by Audre Lorde, she places her finger on a sore spot. Not only is the white gaze still dominant in our society, Black women are doubly disadvantaged: they aren't white and they aren't men. Beks shows how systematic is not to be seen or heard. Her essay De kleine Morrison: een wegwijzer in het lezen van haar werk vanuit Zwart perspectief (The Little Morrison: A Signpost to Reading Her Work from a Black Perspective, 2023) offers readers of Toni Morrison, the most famous female black writer and Nobel Prize for Literature winner who died in 2019, insight into her life and work. Beks shows that in everything she does, Morrison invites self-critical reflection on language, structure, power, gender, race, law and injustice, blackness, the white gaze and the meaning of oral and written narratives.
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Robin Block

(The Netherlands, 1980) is a poet and musician. His performances combine language, music and the bodily. Following his roots and family history, much of his work is related to the colonial past of the Netherlands and Indonesia, as well as the topics of belonging and displacement. His last poetry collection Handbook for the Displaced was awarded the Herman de Coninck prize and the J.C. Bloem poetry prize, and was translated into English and Indonesian. Several of his poems were screened in Manual for the Displaced, a poetry film project together with cinematographer Jeremy Flohr. Block also writes columns, teaches poetry and works as an editor for Dutch poetry magazine Awater.

Go to the website of Robin Block
Instagram: @robinblock
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Pola Oloixarac

(Argentina, 1977) writes fiction and essays and is a translator and blogger. She studied philosophy at the university in Buenos Aires and was selected in 2010 as one of the best young Spanish-language authors by Granta magazine. Her books often tackle themes such as fear and violence, war, sex, eroticism, drug use and philosophy. Her debut, Las teorías salvajes (2008; English translation Savage Theories), is an extreme and satirical portrait of the Buenos Aires university bubble in which complex personalities wrangle with a mess of visionary theories, seeking their place in the fragmented digital world. Las constelaciones oscuras (Dark Constellations, 2015) is a novel that races from the era of 19th-century science to an ultra-surveilled near future. In Mona (2019), success takes a dark turn for a young Latin American woman during a literary festival in Sweden. The novel employs gothic elements to deal with sexuality, sensuality and violence against women, with dead animals and mysterious men in black making appearances.





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Aafke Romeijn

(Netherlands, 1986) is a successful musician, author and journalist. She debuted as a novelist with Concept M (2018). This well-received sci-fi novel takes place in the Netherlands in 2020. A young woman makes sense in a surprising way of her condition of colourlessness, a chronic disease that has grown to epidemic proportions in Europe. She radicalizes and ends up in an organization that carries out attacks. Romeijn has performed as a pop-music artist at festivals such as Lowlands and Noorderslag. With her beats, razor-sharp lyrics and analog synthesizers, she's the uncrowned queen of Dutch-language electropop. Her album M, the soundtrack to her novel and her first self-produced record, was released in 2019, followed in 2020 by her debut poetry collection Leegstand (Vacancy). In 2021 she released the album Godzilla and published 7B, another sci-fi novel set in the year 2040 in Groningen, where military personnel train in a huge complex for a war over natural resources.
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Roanne van Voorst

(Utrecht, 1983) is a dr. in anthropology, writer, investigative journalist, (TEDx) speaker and university lecturer. She has written seven books, both fiction and non-fiction. Her latest book, Six in Bed, explores the future of love and friendship. Her work has been translated into several languages ​​and some of her books are published internationally. As an 'anthropologist of the future', her research focuses on what a sustainable and desirable future of our world could be. She mainly thinks about what she calls 'sustainable humanity': how do we keep hope in an era characterized by climate change and 'fake news'? What keeps us human, in times of robotization? Will we soon fall in love with robots, dine with avatars, and leave our work tasks to algorithms? What is the effect of this on our society, and on our individual happiness and well-being? And which skills do we need to teach ourselves in order to remain successful, both humanly and professionally, in a high-tech future?
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Rebecca Solnit

(USA, 1961) is an art critic, cultural historian, political activist and author of more than 20 highly acclaimed books. She is one of the most important thinkers on the subjects of feminism, climate, art and politics. Her work is translated worldwide and has won many prizes. "I am an abused child, having grown up in a violent household in which everything female was hated," she said in a 2014 interview with Rookiemag.com. In the same year, her collection of essays Men Explain Things to Me was published. In The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (2017), the essay "Climate Change and Violence" argues that climate change is a form of violence toward the world's population. Other well-known and translated works include Wanderlust (2000), The Mother of All Questions (2017) and Whose Story is This? (2020). In 2020 she also published Recollections of My Non-Existence, dealing with her experiences as a writer and feminist in the San Fransisco in the eighties, a society characterized by violence against and the exclusion of women.


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