You Are Here

Broken Dimanche Press is pleased to launch with the release of a catalogue of intention, a guide book to Europe from a unique point of view. From interrogating Nicolas Bourriaud‘s ideas of a new age of the altermodern to the daily life of a political activist in the last dictatorship in Europe,Belarus, You Are Here goes a way to offering a unique field book for contemporary Europe. A continent where young artists and activists blend forms and travel in their work, living in one country while all the while subtly interrogating their home countries’ traditions and expectations. A generation has come of age in a post-Wall Europe who no longer feel obligated to answer the national questions, but instead answer to their unique personal experience, one of borderless work and travel, mediated by translation and the Internet. Such instances of artistic, intellectual and activist projects are given space in You Are Here, offering the chance to see whether such young practitioners really are writing from a freedom and plurality born in 1989 back into a new, wider and pan-European tradition in 2009.

Featuring:

Martin John Callanan is an artist whose work spans numerous mediums and engages both emerging and commonplace technology. Some of his more well-known pieces include the ambient audio installation Sonification of You, the meta-news aggregator I Wanted to See All the News From Today and Text Trends, which abstracts the casual manner in which we receive, scan and process information and language on a daily basis. Martin is currently Artist in Residence at UCL Environment Institute and Teaching Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art UCL. Grounds (Berliner Mauer) is the result of a research residency in Simon Faithfull’s Mobile Research Unit no.1 at Skulpturenpark Berlin, August 2009.

Anna Bro was born at Fyn in 1980. Her parents were actors and met each other in a theatre group called Banden. They took part in political group theatre and tried out lots of things until it all dissolved and they moved to Copenhagen. Although she was not old back then, the group theatre of the 70s and 80s has influenced her considerably (in what is somewhat a love-hate relationship!). She started doing theatre at the age of 18 and created her own theatre group. Since she finished her degree in dramaturgy at the Århus Theatre, she has written scripts for several different theatres in Denmark. She has worked amongst other places in Mungo Park Theatre and been part of the Royal Theatre’s “Ensemble in the Ensemble”, Turbo Town. At the moment she is working on several film projects.

Ann Cotten Born 1982 in Ames, Iowa, grew up in Vienna and now lives in Vienna and Berlin. She published a book of sonnets on foreign words, Fremdwörterbuchsonette (edition Suhrkamp 2007) and Nach der Welt: Die Listen der Konkreten Poesie und ihre Folgen, Klever Verlag 2008 (‘After the World: Lists of Concrete Poetry and their Effects’). Her latest project is the website www.glossarattrappen.de featuring alphabetically indexed texts, images and an experiment in reading. Irregularly in Berlin she hosts the "Rotten Kinck Schow" together with Monika Rinck, Sabine Scho and shifting guests.

Agnieszka Drotkiewicz Born in 1981 in Warsaw Agnieszka is a writer and journalist. Author of three novels: Paris London Dachau (2004), Dla mnie to samo (‘The Same for Me’, 2006) and Teraz (‘Right Now’, 2009), and co-author of two books – collections of interviews with writers and artists (among them Michel Houellebecq, Marlene Streeruwitz, Dubravka Ugresic). She published in several Polish magazines, such as “Lampa”, “Gazeta Wyborcza”, “Wysokie Obcasy”, “Krytyka Polityczna”, the German “Der Tagesspiegel” and many others. Moderator of several panel discussions (among them: “We want the entire life!” in Uppsala, during “Kobieta betyder kvinna” festival in 2008). In 2006 Drotkiewicz was awarded the scholarship for writers in Villa Decius, Cracow and in 2009 in Literarisches Colloquium Berlin.

Volha Martynenka Born in 1983 in Minsk, Belarus, Martynenka graduated from the Philosophy and Social Science Department of the Belarusian State University, Minsk in 2006. Scientific interests include immigration within the context of globalization, women and queer studies. Following a nomadic lifestyle since 2007, she has engaged with freelance journalism, sporadic political analysis and translation. Volunteer work with mentally disabled people is Martynenka’s present main social activity.

Ursuala Wozniak Born in 1984 in Szczecin, Poland, she grew up in West Germany. She lives in Berlin, where she studies European Ethnology and Art History at Humboldt University and Political Science at Free University. As an anthropologist she works on the topics of migration, postcolonialism and urban development. Since 2008, she took part in several exhibitions and art projects in Berlin: She co-curated an exhibition on globalist projects in-between Istanbul and Berlin TransglobalLiveMemoryBox, contributed an installation on Herbert Marcuse to the exhibition Berlin 68 Sichten einer Revolte and most recently, she did research on polish migrant’s perspectives on the fall of the Berlin Wall in the project Placemaking.

Francesca Musiani Born in 1984 in Padova, Italy Musiani is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation, Mines ParisTech in Paris, France; she is also a member of the Vox Internet II research project, and maintains a collaboration with the University of Padova. Her thesis research focuses on the processes of social construction of the Internet governance realm, and in particular, explores features and implications of alternative uses of peer-to-peer technology. Francesca is fluent in English, French, Spanish and her native Italian, and before joining the CSI, she has been a student in California, a journalist at the United Nations in New York, a graduate student and research assistant in Costa Rica, and a radio speaker in Padova. She likes to define herself as a citizen of the world in-the-making and is passionate about interesting people, music, movies and stories from around the world.

Christophe Van Gerrewey Born in 1982, Van Gerrewey studied architecture at the University of Ghent and literature at the University of Leuven. He has published both fiction and non-fiction in magazines and books, such as Reality without Restraint, Bathtime in the Villa dall'Ava (2005) and Rotterdam (2007, together with Bas Princen). He works as a researcher and teacher at the Department of Architecture and Urbanism at Ghent University. In 2008, he was awarded with the First Price for Young Art Criticism (Amsterdam).

With translations by:

Joy Hawley Born and raised in Walnut, California, Joy Hawley earned her degree in Literary Journalism and German from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands. She lives in her adopted home city of Berlin, where she works as a freelance translator. She is also regularly involved in cultural and literary projects and strives to bridge the German- and English-speaking worlds by introducing people to new writers, because, in the words of Lyn Hejinian, “language is a medium for experiencing experience,” and stepping into these other experiences is crucial for our understanding of the world, as well as for motivating us to change it.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones An editor and translator Lloyd-Jones read Russian and Ancient Greek at Oxford. Her translations from Polish include Who was David Weiser? by Pawel Huelle (nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award) and House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk.