Sophia Barthelmes - ein reim & Alexander Rudolfi - Willkommen im Bauch der Maschine: Lesung und Sound Performance

In the organizer's words:

The authors Sophia Barthelmes and Alexander Rudolfi will read from their publications, which were recently published in the "Rohstoff" series by Matthes und Seitz Berlin.

"ein reim" by Sophia Barthelmes (2025) uses small linguistic units, words, morphemes, letters and their breaks to examine the quality of rhyme: two people who are similar and dissimilar at the same time; and de- and recomposes connections, memory, identity(ies) with these linguistic units or two units. Does child rhyme with mother? What is a two?

The author reads from her long poem. Voice and performance artist Alexey Kokhanov, who has written compositions for some units of the long poem, picks up on individual words, letters, lines and pairs of lines sonically with score, improvisation and composition. The text is made visually accessible as surtitles.

The plane approaches, takes off and accelerates to take off, but the thoughts of the narrator in Alexander Rudolfi's debut novel "Welcome to the Belly of the Machine (2025) push back. Back to the Italian island where he read Gramsci's prison notebooks, observed current political events, got to know S. and took her on excursions to the villages, which are notorious for their resilience, have strong ties to tradition and have become partially uninhabitable due to the mining of heavy metals. Thus he reaches the jagged shores of his consciousness, times and words intermingle, and he is increasingly confronted with the question of when he lost control: only when he sat down in the plane and left himself in the hands of an invisible pilot? Or even before that?

In a dense structure between lyrical reflection and prosaic experience, Welcome to the Belly of the Machine tells an intoxicating and dazzling tale of paranoid life in a technocratic reality - and of the attempt to find a way out.

Sophia Barthelmes directs and writes. She studied cultural and literary studies, modern German literature, theater directing and scenic writing. She works transdisciplinary in the field of language in the performing, performing, visual and sound arts. In 2025, she was awarded the City of Graz Literature Prize and was nominated for the Retzhofer Dramapreis. "ein reim" is her first book publication.

Alexey Kokhanov is a vocalist and sound artist based in Berlin and works at the interface of new music and sound performance. In his artistic practice, he explores aspects of voice - physiological, psychological, aesthetic and political. In 2025 he completed a master's degree in spatial strategies at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee.

Alexander Rudolfi, born in 1987 in Freyung, studied social work, philosophy and literary writing in Munich, Hildesheim and Sassari. In 2022 he was the winner of the open mike competition. His work has been supported by a working grant from the state of Lower Saxony, a scholarship from the Minerva Kolleg and a residency grant from Künstlerhäuser Worpswede. Texts have appeared in various magazines (manuskripte, Transistor, die horen, etc.). In 2022, his book hyperlinklabyrinthe was published by parasitenpresse.

Price information:

5-12 €