6/3/25
Tue,
19:30

Berlin Poetry Lecture – Claudia Rankine
Writing as Seeing

Talk
Poesiefestival Berlin 2025
Akademie der Künste
← / →

© Ricardo DeAratanha

© Andreas Labes

The tenth Berlin Poetry Lecture will be delivered by the highly acclaimed US-American author and founder of the Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII), Claudia Rankine (born 1963 in Kingston, Jamaica). She is thus the latest of speakers, who was preceded by Oswald Egger (2016), John Burnside (2017), Elke Erb (2018), Sergio Raimondi (2019), Anne Carson (2020), Johannes Jansen (2021), Michèle Métail (2022), Kim Hyesoon (2023) and Terrance Hayes (2024). Rankine is best known for her distinctive form of poetically dense essayistic writing, which she interweaves with photography and memoir. Of particular note here is her trilogy Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Citizen (2014), and Just Us (2020), in which Rankine addresses systems of social discrimination and violence.

In her lecture, Rankine outlines a poetics of what is seen, taking the image and perception of what is happening around us as a starting point for speaking and writing. “My entire life as a writer has involved approaching the image as much as possible to reveal not only what is seen but what is not seen.” There is an ethical obligation to articulate the image as a counternarrative and to thereby anchor it in reality during times when political influence seeks to control what can be said. Language must bear witness to what is seen and thereby become an act of resistance to repression and the normalization of violence: “To speak what we see should be the least we can do.” Examining how one might remain true to a reflective relationship between text and image in the present moment, Rankine draws on artists and writers such as Carolin Emcke or Teju Cole, who give voice in their work to what has been silenced.

Introduction: Carolin Emcke

A reception with music by rouge-ah will take place in the foyer beforehand.

Kindly supported by the Slovenian Cultural Information Centre SKICA Berlin

Claudia Rankine’s participation in the festival is kindly supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, where she is a fellow in 2025.

The event will be held in English with German surtitles and takes place at Kleines Parkett.

At the event, Writing as Seeing will celebrate its English and German (translated by Uda Strätling) publication by Wallstein Verlag (18,00 €). Deutschlandfunk Kultur will broadcast a recording of the lecture.