Reading - Tanja Dückers

Tanja Dückers, who is the first author in residence ever at summer acadamy,  read from her book „Der längste Tag des Jahres“ [The longest day of the year] - a family portrait narrated in five chapters starting with the sudden death of the father. She chose to read out of this narration because of it’s interrelation with Visual Art. The chapter, out of which Tanja Dückers read, deals about Thomas who left his family in Germany after school and settled in a sect-community called „The Sun-People“ in the Canadian desert. The Sun People are constantly in search of so called power-fields in the desert, which turn to be artistic installation such as Achim Mohné’s „Land-Media-Sculpture“, a constant light powered by wind and solarenergy.

Even though the reading was in German, because Tanja Dückers is a German writing author and it's hard to translate literature, many students came to listen to her. After a few paragraphs it became clear, how Dückers made herself a name in Berlins poetry slam szene. Her voice is very powerful, her pronunciation accent-free with a charming little influence of Berlin-slang and every single word seems carefully choosen.

After the reading the audience had the chance to question Mrs. Dückers about her work and particulary about her correspondence in cipher she used to work with since 1997  - This topic seemed to generated the interest of the audience a lot, but when it came to the point to ask her how to decode this writings, she underlined that it was only designed for herself to give her the chance to work in public spaces without anybody realizing what she is authoring about. So she just gave a very opaque description about her own language "Autumnisch" and when she explained how she developed her font and made it more complex within the last ten years, it became clear to everyone, hoping to decode it sometime, that "Autumnisch" is gonna stay Tanja Dückers secret for maybe forever.