“Es gibt nur eine Familie: die terrestrische”. Eine Performance Lecture von Kim de L’Horizon

In the organizer's words:

"If I were as tall as you. Blood beech. You can just grow. No one determines your shape. I want to be like you."

Based on the bestseller Blood Book (2022), Kim de l'Horizon talks about more-than-human relationships - especially between humans and trees. At the center is the delicate blood beech as a figure of thought and experience, which reveals central questions of our present: the (in)ability to empathize, processes of growing and in-grouping and out-grouping.

Kim presents a lecture performance that moves between reading, improvised speaking and singing. Based on text fragments - from Blutbuch to Donna Haraway to historical church laws - an associative network of research, reflection and voice unfolds.

A particular focus is on the question of how to talk about animism from a white, European perspective. For centuries, Christianity has tried to suppress relationships between humans and more-than-human beings - especially those with trees, which were closely linked to ancestor cults and magical practices. Against this background, the performance poses the question of how local animist traces can be resumed in Europe without denying the colonial legacy carried by white European subjects.

The lecture is created in the moment: as free speech from Kim's research, as tentative thinking in real time.

There is only one family: the terrestrial family - those who become from, of and to the earth.

Participants

Kim de l'Horizon (without pronouns or they/them), born 2666 on Gethen, studied German in the Ivory Tower, literary weeping in Biel and witchcraft with Starhawk.

Kim's debut novel "Blutbuch", which has been translated into 17 languages, won the German and Swiss Book Prize, among others. Kim's plays have been invited to the Heidelberg Play Market and have won the Hermann Sudermann Prize, among others. Kim also makes rituals and performs at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, among others. Kim was nominated for the "Nestroy ORF Audience Award 2024" for her performance in "Blutstück". They like to shake up the images we have of bodies, of humans and non-humans, of 'naturalness' and of 'we'.

- free of charge

- from 14 years

- Language: German

- Mechanical arena in the foyer

- Belongs to: Fate or choice?, Relationship to family