This event has been ended!
neue Texte von etcetera press berlin
new texts from etcetera press berlin
Event by: Erec Schumacher
Location: Galerie Oqbo, Brunnenstraße 63, Berlin - Mitte
Talks & discussions
About event
Elke Heinemann, Susan Madsen and Christiane Quandt read from their works recently or soon to be published by etcetera press berlin and talk to the publisher Erec Schumacher about them Conversation.
Elke Heinemann "clouds of rocks and waters" (07/2025)
Three cycles of poems, 78 texts of seven lines each in justified form: a clear, strict form that opens up surprisingly wide spaces for the natural material in its diversity, its movement, its transitions. Elke Heinemann, poet, writer and essayist, has received several awards for her work, most recently with the Bad Godesberg Literature Prize 2023 and the Venice Scholarship from the BKM 2022. In her poetry she combines observation of nature with reflection, fantasy with feeling, association with poetic permeability. Microscopic observations and mythological perspectives meet, mix with one another and draw fine networks through what is visible and what can just be said, through the outside world and the inside. The poet Nora Gomringer calls this a “world view” that allows for both – “an outside as well as an inside”. The poems were written on various islands in Europe - on Anglesey in the Irish Sea, on Naxos in the Aegean and on the islands of the Venetian old town. They are not travel protocols, but transform perception into density, light into structure, landscape into text.
Susan Madsen "True stories about fake children" (10/2025)
In her prose debut, the author and photographer Susan Madsen reconstructs her anti-authoritarian childhood in Denmark. They are short stories, often the shortest, in which she laconically describes the supposedly precarious living conditions of her childhood in an almost matter-of-fact, often humorous tone. The stories are as if gutted; a few lines are enough to capture and illuminate a scene, a mood. The focus is on the relationship with the single mother: her eccentric nature as a yoga-practicing, self-sufficient woman and member of the Danish Communist Party, her changing partnerships, her closeness to hidden RAF sympathizers. A mother who takes time off, so that the first-person narrator and her sister are temporarily housed with foster parents or in a children's home, or have to live homeless in tents or demolished houses. There are stories about a mentally ill grandmother who suffers from epilepsy, about a neighbor boy who shoots a bullet through his sister's head in a game, about a pedophile German teacher and a drunkard. A life full of adventure and little moments of happiness, a life with cockroaches, fairies, trolls and other house spirits. Madsen talks about fossilized sea urchins that she wraps in tissue paper or how "a concoction of cleaning products, salt and other disgusting things" is cooked on the broken stove and passed off as cocoa.
Christiane Quandt "Spiegelneuroses (09/2025)
"90 mirrorneuroses" is Christiane Quandt's second volume of poetry after "on the magic mountain there is no more room for everyone" at etcetera press berlin. Here, too, autobiographical-autofictional entries regularly published on social media are the starting point, which in Describing everyday situations in a poetic, condensed form, sorting emotional states and identities and mixing them up again. It is a language without embellishments, in constant metamorphosis, with biting humor and self-ironic slapstick about vulnerability, neurodiversity and one's own chronic illness, always with a sense of the immediate gap that appears in the text Everyday life, in life. It is also a bestiary in which Quandt expresses her connection to all animal creatures, transforms them shamanically or invites them to actively participate in her life. Quandt salutes butterflies, carries caterpillars across the street or takes a wild ride on the back of a turtle. Christiane Quandt is a Latin American scholar and, as a translator, has written numerous books from Spanish and... Translated from Portuguese into German. Most recently, works by Andrea Abreu, Alana Portero, Layla Martínez and Beatriz Serrano appeared in her translation. She lives and works in the High Deck settlement in Berlin-Neukölln.
Elke Heinemann "clouds of rocks and waters" (07/2025)
Three cycles of poems, 78 texts of seven lines each in justified form: a clear, strict form that opens up surprisingly wide spaces for the natural material in its diversity, its movement, its transitions. Elke Heinemann, poet, writer and essayist, has received several awards for her work, most recently with the Bad Godesberg Literature Prize 2023 and the Venice Scholarship from the BKM 2022. In her poetry she combines observation of nature with reflection, fantasy with feeling, association with poetic permeability. Microscopic observations and mythological perspectives meet, mix with one another and draw fine networks through what is visible and what can just be said, through the outside world and the inside. The poet Nora Gomringer calls this a “world view” that allows for both – “an outside as well as an inside”. The poems were written on various islands in Europe - on Anglesey in the Irish Sea, on Naxos in the Aegean and on the islands of the Venetian old town. They are not travel protocols, but transform perception into density, light into structure, landscape into text.
Susan Madsen "True stories about fake children" (10/2025)
In her prose debut, the author and photographer Susan Madsen reconstructs her anti-authoritarian childhood in Denmark. They are short stories, often the shortest, in which she laconically describes the supposedly precarious living conditions of her childhood in an almost matter-of-fact, often humorous tone. The stories are as if gutted; a few lines are enough to capture and illuminate a scene, a mood. The focus is on the relationship with the single mother: her eccentric nature as a yoga-practicing, self-sufficient woman and member of the Danish Communist Party, her changing partnerships, her closeness to hidden RAF sympathizers. A mother who takes time off, so that the first-person narrator and her sister are temporarily housed with foster parents or in a children's home, or have to live homeless in tents or demolished houses. There are stories about a mentally ill grandmother who suffers from epilepsy, about a neighbor boy who shoots a bullet through his sister's head in a game, about a pedophile German teacher and a drunkard. A life full of adventure and little moments of happiness, a life with cockroaches, fairies, trolls and other house spirits. Madsen talks about fossilized sea urchins that she wraps in tissue paper or how "a concoction of cleaning products, salt and other disgusting things" is cooked on the broken stove and passed off as cocoa.
Christiane Quandt "Spiegelneuroses (09/2025)
"90 mirrorneuroses" is Christiane Quandt's second volume of poetry after "on the magic mountain there is no more room for everyone" at etcetera press berlin. Here, too, autobiographical-autofictional entries regularly published on social media are the starting point, which in Describing everyday situations in a poetic, condensed form, sorting emotional states and identities and mixing them up again. It is a language without embellishments, in constant metamorphosis, with biting humor and self-ironic slapstick about vulnerability, neurodiversity and one's own chronic illness, always with a sense of the immediate gap that appears in the text Everyday life, in life. It is also a bestiary in which Quandt expresses her connection to all animal creatures, transforms them shamanically or invites them to actively participate in her life. Quandt salutes butterflies, carries caterpillars across the street or takes a wild ride on the back of a turtle. Christiane Quandt is a Latin American scholar and, as a translator, has written numerous books from Spanish and... Translated from Portuguese into German. Most recently, works by Andrea Abreu, Alana Portero, Layla Martínez and Beatriz Serrano appeared in her translation. She lives and works in the High Deck settlement in Berlin-Neukölln.