Souvenirs & Memoirs: Biographical Writing

Working with personal objects participants bring with them to the workshop – gifts, heirlooms, found or acquired objects – we want to explore how these objects can help us talk about ourselves.

We will focus on (auto)biographical writing as an act of self-authorisation: being writers in order to write ourselves. This workshop welcomes writing in all languages as well as multilingual texts. The event is designed for people who identify as women, lesbians, intersex, non-binary, trans or agender.

Artist Mara Younes Almokbel and authors Sandra Burkhardt and Miriam Rainer create an open writing space for FLINTA* in the Brücke-Museum’s Waldraum (Forest Room).

Marwa Younes Alkmobel (b. 1991 in Damascus, Syria) studied art with a focus on printmaking at Damascus University. She has lived in Berlin since 2016, where she works as a graphic designer, painter and performance artist.

Sandra Burkhardt (b. 1992 in Laupheim) studied art history and creative writing in Karlsruhe, Leipzig, and Berlin. Her literary debut Wer A sagt (Say A) was published in 2018 and deals with ornamental phenomena. In 2024, she published Fragmente einer echten Ikone (Fragments of a Real Icon) with kookbooks. She has been a member of the German-Arabic literature and translation collective Wiese (Wie es ist) since 2020.

Miriam Rainer (*1987) studied American, German, and comparative literature in Hamburg, Vienna, and Providence, RI. Her dissertation Anarchie des Anagramms (Anarchy of the Anagram) was published with Archive Books in 2024. She has worked within self-organised translation collectives as an author and curator for the last ten years, including Versatorium in Vienna and Wiese (Wie es ist) in Berlin. In 2022, she co-directed the project Al-Khatib-Glossar; in 2023, she supported the organisational development of Forensis e.V. and this fall, she will curate the Sub Rosa Translation Series alongside Kenan Khadaj.

* FLINTA is an acronym that stands for Frauen, Lesben, Inter, Nonbinäre, Trans and Agender (women, lesbians, intersex, nonbinary, trans and agender). The term comes from feminist practices and is intended to gather those groups of society who are negatively impacted by patriarchy.