anorak studio // The First Last Reading of Summer

Among all else it was, this was a hot reading summer.

The reading’s current hotness points to a novel confluence of art and theory and Instagram and desires left wanting elsewhere, among them the desire for well-packaged insights besides the venues of academic research. And certainly, the trendiness of an already written off format has to do with the ways we are being impoverished as neoliberal strategies get sublated into fascisising cultural politics. But if this is a sell-out, maybe we can make a snatch? If the reading’s a symptom, let’s track it a bit longer. Track, ride, savor it for another while, chew it until it becomes all chewy. Besides, isn’t reading season just about to begin given the first whiffs of chimney smoke? Dress warm, dress hot, no need to bring a jacket, you will be covered by an anorak. Oh, and there will be focaccia.

The anorak studio series invites artists based in or passing through Berlin to experiment and share ideas with peers and the wider public. It serves as a communal space for live events that push against creative and formal limitations such as genre, canon, authorship, expertise, coherence, and censorship.

Rudi Burkhardt

Rudi Burkhardt is a German poet interested in ornamentation, design & decorative arts, jokes in poetry, “Haushalt” and teaching. His debut “Wer A sagt” was published by Gutleut Verlag in 2018, followed 2024 by “Fragmente einer echten Ikone”, mistranslations and appropriations of love poems by the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch, published by kookbooks.

Jannis Weu

Jannis Weu was born in Greifswald in 1998. They work as a social worker and artist and currently study at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. Jannis works span media of text, performance, sculpture, and image.

Cru Encarnação

Through a critical subversion of masculinity in 19th-century Stage Magic/Illusionism, the History of Science and Transsexual discourse, Cru Encarnação investigates the tensions between Science and Magic. He explores the grammars of perception and how illusion and accidentality inform collective belief, the physicality of socially constructed meaning and marginal definitions of “technology” and “knowledge”.

a. Monti

a. Monti is a cross-disciplinary poet, educator and translator. They edit books with Litmus Press and co-publish the biannual smut gazette Womanwood (CUTT Press). Their writing has appeared in The Offing, McSweeney’s, The Berliner, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and Montez Press Radio, among others. Monti is based between Berlin and New York City but was born in an elevator in Rome going up to the third floor.

C. Bain

C. Bain is a gender liminal writer and performance artist who works on the queer body as a site of violence and knowledge extraction. He has a studio art MFA from CalArts and a social work degree from Hunter College. His plays have been shown at the Tank, Dixon Place, and the LGBT Center in NYC. Previous performances include the Getty Center, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Highline. Publications include Debridement (2015) and Sex Augury (2023). He was a 2023–24 Fulbright scholar in Leipzig, researching the end of the world.

Mari Molle

Mari Molle writes and translates. In 2023, “Die Stunde zwischen Hund und Wolf” (“The Hour Between Dog and Wolf”) was published in the Rohstoff series by Matthes & Seitz. Other publications include Manuscripte, Hot Topic!, and PS – Politisch schreiben. They are part of the literary magazine Edit and the poetry group fährten. Lives with their child in Leipzig.

Liola Mattheis 

Liola Mattheis is a poet and theorist based in Berlin. Both her academic and literary work interrogate natural history, ecology, sexuality, and accumulation. Her poetic practice often leans on formalist approaches and is driven by (sur)real abstractions. Recent publications include a prose poetry pamphlet with TABLOID.

Zack Darsee

Zack Darsee was born around noon on a Tuesday. He is the author of BELL LOGIC (Spiral Editions) and Anzündkind (Creative Writing Department). His collaboration with Elise Houcek, a lysergic neo-noir poet’s novel From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson is forthcoming from Inside the Castle in 2025. Together with Nadia Marcus, they run TABLOID Press. This work continues.