DEDI’s Summer School

September 2019 witnessed DEDI’s Dialogue Forum/ Summer School of Writing and Translation, which took place in Aarhus, Denmark. The 5 days brought together an exceptional group of Egyptian and Danish writers and translators under the theme “the healing powers of language”

The summer school was curated by the writers Haytham El Wardany and Nazila Ghavami Kivi and was followed by a live reading event and music concert. The sessions took place at Moesgaard Museum and Lynfabriqqen co-working space. A podcast documenting the different conversations and discussions will follow.  

The Healing Powers of Language

It is a search for the possibility of recovery through language and writing. In the times of political suppressions and collective and personal traumas, language becomes under assault. It can not longer give shape anymore for reality, and words don’t mean anything. Yet in language lies the remedy as well, for only in language we can overcome reality by giving it a shape.

Proposed sets of questions:

1. When do the animals speak? What are they telling us? And what happens to language when it stops to be the borderline between humans and other creatures?
2. What kind of desire motivates your work? How can we produce new desires? What happens when our desires dry out?
3. How does history sound like? Is it hope or despair that it tells us? What tools do we have to trust what we are hearing?
4. Is the notion of communication relevant to your work? What does the work actually communicate? And to whom?
5. How did you see the world differently when you were a child? Do you remember thinking of objects, plants and non-humans as being alive in a different way than you do now? What was alive in your childhood world?

The discussed readings are Etel Adnan’s To Write In Foreign Language, Some Notes On Song by John Berger; Deleuze, Schizoanalyst by Suely Rolnik, the criminal prosecution of animals by E.P.Evans, Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men.