The closing event of Eszter Salamon's Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship presents The Living Book, a practice-led research presentation developed by Eszter Salamon with students of Critical Dance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. The project forms part of Salamon's long-term research into the life and work of the German avant-garde dancer and artist Valeska Gert, including her Valeska Gert Monuments series, developed since 2016. Conceived as anti-monuments, these performative works seek to activate embodied and temporal relationships to history, proposing artistic research as a critical and experimental practice that challenges conventional forms of knowledge production. Drawing on Gert's autobiographical book Ich bin Eine Hexe: Kaleidoskop meines Lebens (1968), together with photographic documentation of her stage and screen performances, The Living Book investigates the relationship between memory and archive. Over the course of the semester, students have explored Salamon’s methodologies for animating collective historical consciousness through the exercise of transgenerational poetic empathy.

The act of composing with the past from the perspective of the present is divergent from imagining the past as it could have happened. Throughout the summer semester, the aim of The Living Book has been to interrogate failed historical consciousness and devise new relationships with the past in order to shape the future (of art and artistic research). The question of what remains in the fishnet of history is one that has been posed by many scholars and artists alike, and there have been and continue to be reasons why Gert's role has not gained more relevance in the history of art. Asking what we learn and how we learn, as well as what we remember and how we remember, is crucial for developing critical relationships with the production of knowledge and art. It is important to note that remembering and archiving is not only for learning about the past; archives shape our imagination and consequently our future.

Eszter Salamon ist bekannt für ihre interdisziplinäre und forschungsbasierte künstlerische Praxis. In zahlreichen Arbeiten setzt sie sich mit dem Erbe Valeska Gerts auseinander. Ihre MONUMENT Serie (seit 2017) untersucht Gerts Leben und Einfluss aus sowohl transhistorischer als auch fiktionaler Perspektive. Ihre performative Installation Study for the Valeska Gert Pavilion wurde 2022 auf der 16. Biennale von Lyon präsentiert. Mit ihrem Kurzfilm Reappearance (2022) begann die ungarische Künstlerin eine Filmreihe über Erinnerung, Archiv und historische Imagination. Zur Eröffnung ihrer Gastprofessur an der Freien Universität Berlin stellt sie mit Sommerspiele (2023) den zweiten Teil dieser Serie vor.

Limited seating, please arrive early for a free ticket.

The Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship at the Institute for Theater Studies has been in existence since the 2006/2007 winter semester. This program is supported by Freie Universität Berlin in cooperation with the Berlin Artist Program, funded by the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtigen Amts), and the Akademie der Künste Berlin.