June 4–5 2026
Lācis & Co.
Female Acteurs – Transit – Narratives
International Conference, conceived by Tatjana Hofmann and Mimmi Woisnitza
Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
In the context of the exhibition “Art Is Not an End in Itself. In Relation to the Constructivist Asja Lācis,” curated by Konstanze Schmitt and Mimmi Woisnitza
Drawing on the nomadic life and work practices of Asja Lācis, the international conference explores the modes of expression through which female authors, journalists, and artists reflect on their migratory movements within the East (and Central) European avant-garde, and seeks out echoes of reception, points of comparison, and contemporary questions. Using case studies of female writers and artists, which will be discussed in the form of thesis-based inputs, the workshop addresses the following questions:
What attitudes toward writing, speaking, and communication arise from experiences of transit? To what extent do these, in turn, reflect the various forms and motivations of transit: travel, migration, exile, or even banishment and deportation? How do these changes of location connect with shifting spatial, social, and infrastructural conditions, as well as with artistic orientations and representational methods? How are traveling bodies and objects represented? What role did and does multilingualism, idiosyncratic writing styles, and translation play in this process?
The conference will take place mostly in German, film program will be LV with EN subtitles.
June 4 (Thursday)
2:00–2:30 PM
Introduction: Asja & Co. Exile Movements East/West
Mimmi Woisnitza and Tatjana Hofmann
2:30–5:15 PM
Art-historical and cinematic perspectives
Iryna Kovalenko
Artistic Representations of Flight, the Front, and Imprisonment in the Russian War Against Ukraine
Matthias Schwartz
“The Girl from Space”: Women’s Space Travel in Soviet Science Fiction Film
Katharina Tchelidze
Forms of Movement Between Exile and Espionage: The Dadaist and Futurist Group H2SO4 in Georgia and Mzia Eristavi
6:00 PM
Evening Lecture
Beata Paškevica
“The Orange Blossoms Smell Totally Crazy.” The Straitjacket of Non-Remembrance: Asja Lācis and the Latvian-Italian Avant-Gardes
The lecture will highlight the Latvian-Italian contacts with whom Lācis associated during her stay in Capri. It proceeds from the hypothesis that Asja Lācis’s perception of the artistic reality of Capri and Naples had a collective character and should actually be viewed as a snapshot of the contemporary avant-garde.
Beata Paškevica, Ph.D. is a Germanist and cultural historian from Latvia, currently pursuing her doctorate at the Department of Applied Linguistics and Cultural Studies in Gemersheim at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz; she is the author of the scholarly monograph “In the City of Slogans: Asja Lacis, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht” (Klartext-Verlag 2006).
She is currently a senior researcher at the National Library of Latvia in Riga. Over the past ten years, she has been researching the cultural and literary history of Livonia in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a particular focus on the influences of Hallean and Herrnhut Pietism and the Enlightenment.
8:00 PM
Film Screening
Māra, Krista Burane, LV with EN subtitles, 2014
Film about the granddaughter of Asja Lācis
In her creative documentary Māra, director Krista Burāne crafts a multi-layered portrait of the prominent Latvian theater director Māra Ķimele. The film explores the sacrifices and choices of a woman in the art world, focusing on Ķimele’s complex relationship with her domineering grandmother, the legendary theater director Anna Lācis (Asja Lācis), as well as with her son.
Followed by: Discussion between Māra Ķimele, Margherita Carbonaro, and Minze Tummescheit
June 5 (Friday)
10:15–12:30
Exile: Bodies and Objects
Annelie Bachmaier
Origin – Transit – Arrival: Perspectives of Polish Women Writers in Argentina
Anna Kipke
Giving Form to Space: The Sculptural Practice of Magdalena Abakanowicz between Elbląg and São Paulo, 1965
LUNCH BREAK
1:30–3:30 PM
The Historical Avant-Garde of the 1920s and 1930s
Ievgeniia Voloshchuk
Female Perspectives on “Red Everyday Life”: Lili Körber and Frida Rubiner Traveling in the Soviet Union of the 1930s
Tatjana Hofmann
From Exile on a World Tour. On Sofija Jablon’ska’s Travelogues.
Nadine Menzel
Shaping the World. Practices of Seeing, Writing, and Constructing in the Travel Diaries of Sculptor Clare Sheridan on Moscow (1920) and Ukraine (1924)
3:30–4:00 PM
Closing Discussion
BREAK
5:00 PM
Reading
Tatjana Hofmann and Olga Martynova #
Between Languages: The Knowledge of Poetry
This lecture-performance combines poetry reading, conversation, and theoretical reflection on multilingualism, translation, and European memory culture. The starting point is a staged poem by Olga Martynova about Asja Lācis.
The focus is on the concept of the “porous” developed by Lācis and Walter Benjamin: Naples becomes a city through whose holes Eastern and Western European history strolls, eras merge, and people encounter one another who historically could never have met. Translation appears less as a transfer of words than as a mediation of atmospheres, gestures, and ways of thinking.
In conversation with Slavicist Tatjana Hofmann, literature is understood as a form of “artistic research”: as an independent practice of knowledge. The result is an open laboratory on language, memory, and the future of European polyphony.
Olga Martynova, born in 1962 in Siberia, grew up in Leningrad, where she co-founded the poetry group “Kamera Chranenia” in the 1980s. In 1991, she moved to Germany with Oleg Jurjew (1959–2018). From 1999 onward, she wrote literary texts in Russian and German. Since 2018, she has written exclusively in German. Olga Martynova is Vice President of the German Academy for Language and Literature, as well as a member of PEN and the Academy of Sciences and Literature (Mainz). She has received, among other awards, the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (2012) and the Berlin Literature Prize (2015). Her most recent publications with S. FISCHER include: “Der Engelherd” (novel, 2016), “Über die Dummheit der Stunde” (essays, 2018), and “Gespräch über die Trauer” (2023). For her poetry collection “Such nach dem Namen des Windes” (2024), Olga Martynova was awarded the Peter Huchel Prize in 2025.
Tatjana Hofmann is a Slavicist, cultural studies scholar, and author specializing in Eastern and Central Eastern Europe. She currently works at the University of Graz. She studied at Humboldt University in Berlin and defended her dissertation, *Literary Ethnographies of Ukraine*, at the University of Zurich. She subsequently worked there as a postdoc and project manager, as well as at the Collegium Helveticum and the University of St. Gallen. Her research focuses in particular on the fields of the avant-garde, post-socialism, and knowledge organization. Her most recent study, Die frühsowjetische Reisereportage (2026), was published by Kadmos Verlag. She is currently preparing a collection of interviews on the history of Slavic studies as well as the novel Züriseelen.
6:00 PM
Workshop Discussion
Nicolas Auzanneau, Margherita Carbonaro, Olga Martynova, Beata Paškevica, Lil Reif
Language as a Space of Transit or Translating Multilingual Spaces
The fact that Asja Lācis could communicate in Latvian, German, and Russian—and also published and wrote her memoirs in these three languages—stems from the transcultural history of the Baltic region. Latvia is a historically multilingual region where Latvian, Russian, and German coexisted for centuries as competing and overlapping languages of administration, culture, and daily life—a constellation that was constantly renegotiated through the shifting power dynamics of the Baltic Germans, the Tsarist Empire, the independent republic, and Soviet occupation. These transcultural interconnections are indispensable for understanding the Latvian avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s, and their effects continue to the present day. The extent to which these interconnections manifest themselves specifically as a phenomenon of translation will be discussed in a workshop conversation with three translators who translate from Latvian into German, French, and Italian.
Nicolas Auzanneau, born in 1972, studied history and literature and has worked in the fields of education, cultural work, and translation. He has had ties to Latvia since 1996 and divides his time between Brussels, where he earns his living as a translator for the European institutions (English, Latvian, Polish, and German), and Riga.
He translates Latvian literature into French—prose, poetry, theater, history, and film. His interests lie in alternative cultures, multiple affiliations, shattered utopias, rare texts, and authors on the margins of society or those who have fallen into oblivion. He has published articles in French on Asja Lacis, notably in “Le dictionnaire universel des créatrices” (Des Femmes, 2013) and in the anthology “Des vies en révolution” (Don Quichotte, 2017). His latest translation: “Belles de sang” (Emmanuelle Collas, 2025) by Inga Gaile.
Margherita Carbonaro is a literary translator and author. She was born in Milan to a family of Italian-Latvian descent. After studying Italian literature, she began working in publishing. She has translated works by numerous German-language authors into Italian, including Thomas Mann, Herta Müller, Uwe Timm, Max Frisch, and others.
She is currently particularly committed to promoting Latvian literature and culture in Italy, both through essays and through translations of writers such as Regīna Ezera and Inga Gaile. She has received several awards for her work, including the Latvian Special Annual Prize for Literature and the German-Italian Translation Prize for her life’s work.
Margherita Carbonaro divides her time between Italy, Germany (Landshut), and Latvia.
Lil Reif, born in 1975, studied Russian, Portuguese, and law in Berlin, Moscow, and Évora, and earned her doctorate at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt with a dissertation on language policy in Latvia. A fellowship from the Robert Bosch Foundation took the Dresden native to Latvia for three years, where, in addition to her work as a visiting lecturer at Ventspils University College, she learned Latvian and began to take an interest in literary translation: initially through small translation workshops she organized in cooperation with the Ventspils Writers’ and Translators’ House, the City Library, and the Goethe-Institut Riga; later followed her first literary translations. Her most recent translations include, in addition to the play “The Bad Mother” by Inga Gaile about Asja Lācis, the novel “Riga Freedom” by Svens Kuzmins (published in 2025 by edition.fotoTAPETA in Berlin) and “The Boy Who Saw in the Dark,” the debut novel by playwright Rasa Bugavičute-Pēce. Lil Reif currently lives in Vienna and translates prose and poetry from Latvian. In 2018, she received the City of Vienna Translation Prize.