Anne Kawala / Sarah Bahr
Language is a system that allows us all as individuals to understand, comment, analyse, and critique the world, drawing on predetermined frames. From the first story written at primary school to high school essays and from PhD theses to the activist’s free speech, the imperatives of discourse are shaped by forms that Sarah Bahr and Anne Kawala strive to break down, pushing them beyond their all-too-restrictive frames.
Sarah Bahr / Incident report
« I am writing to enquire whether you already have the dates at your disposition, since what I am holding here in my hands is a key without a door and our position is thus once again that of people facing difficulties in keeping up a regular engagement and obeying the basic principles of the internal rules and regulations, and now, what is our reaction to all this. You start with things that you have decided are true and then you add nothing else. We could tell ourselves that we will go round in circles, but we have to be there when it matters because it is an authentic act, a swagger with a puffed-out chest, and that’s without even bringing up the issue of responsibility. The zeitgeist blowing in the wind enters our lungs and I need sensitising, but without wasting time. Being whatever is something you have to work for. Unfortunately, the importance of dysfunctional thoughts has not yet been sufficiently grasped by the vast majority. (…) » Sarah Bahr
Sarah Bahr was born on 16 June, 1986, in Heilbronn, Germany. Her visual and poetic work takes her in many directions, often taking shape as performances and texts written in French. She studied theatre at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen and later furthered her training at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon. She recently published Embâcle (Les petits matins, 2015) and regularly collaborates with the Swiss collective We Ate Lobster on new pieces for the theatre. She is currently working towards publishing a dual-language cartography of an intimate chronicle of the Swabian dialect.
Anne Kawala / Critical Poetry
Anne Kawala’s critical poetry, some of which she has published on her own site poesiecritique.tumblr.com, invents a new literary genre that is part commentary, part analysis, part personal impressions, and part digression. She takes a book, a work of art, or a personality as her starting point to unravel a skein and weave tangible thought at the junction between ars rhetorica and ars poetica.
Anne Kawala was born in 1980 in Herlincourt, a small town in northern France. She is a poet, trained at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon. She has published half a dozen works of poetry, most recently Le déficit indispensable (screwball) with the publishers Al Dante. Her writing draws on documentary writing, narrative, and autofiction, combining a range of material from the graphic arts that she translates into sound variations in her performances.
She was awarded a grant by the French National Book Centre in 2011 and has also been writer in residence at Moly Sabata in 2014, the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart in 2013, Sidon and Beirut, Lebanon, in 2011 with the generous support of the Marseilles International Poetry Centre, and at the Chartreuse in Villeneuve lez Avignon. Together with Emilie Rousset, she co-created the plays La terreur du boomerang and Mars-Watchers at the Comédie theatre in Rheims in 2010 and 2013 respectively, and has collaborated with the choreographer Olivia Grandville on Ma belle entomologie for the festival Concordanse.
