Prenons la parole! - lasst uns das Wort ergreifen!

Prendre la parole is a poetic-conceptual workshop by Laura Mahnke that combines personal experiences with political and social issues. The focus is on the invitation to reflect together on speechlessness, shame, anger, ambivalence, disagreement and the longing for change and solidarity.

We work with clay - but not in the traditional sense. The material serves as a supportive medium for talking, listening or thinking. When the hands are busy, thoughts can start to move and words can emerge more easily. The participants intuitively shape small megaphones out of clay. These are not realistic objects, but fragile traces of a shared discourse.



Based on the surrealist Écriture Automatique, in which hidden thoughts come to the surface through uninterrupted writing, the clay is also worked on freely and associatively. At the same time, people can talk about what moves them politically and socially - and how these topics feel physically or emotionally. There is no compulsion to speak: listening, silence or finding words internally are also part of the process.

At the end of the workshop, a resonating thought or outlook is formulated together. The resulting megaphones can be taken away. They remain unfired and thus retain their transience - open to being transformed into something new at a later date.



Short biography

Laura Mahnke explores the inner wafting of people and their relationship to the surrounding past and present. She translates writing techniques such as Écriture Automatique into sculptural processes, exploring the boundaries of control and loss of control. This results in abstractions of carnality and hidden landscapes, which manifest themselves in sculpture series and "pourings" - spatial interventions with liquid porcelain. Mahnke studied at the HFBK Hamburg and the École des Beaux-Arts et de Design Marseille-Méditerranée and will complete her master's degree with Kader Attia in 2027. She is a trained ceramist and mother of a son.