The Neighborhood invites you to an evening of thinking, talking, wrestling (intellectually) and noshing (heavily) with writers/artists Max Czollek (Germany) and Rachel Mars (UK).
Both Max and Rachel have spent the past few years of their distinct practices interrogating diasporic Jewish identity through writing, poetry, plays, metalwork and installation. For this conversation they come together with NYC based artists to talk about how Nation State Identities and their construction trouble living Jewish bodies. Ideas of memorial, monument and forgetting; and how on earth we are all finding our way through since October 7 – what, if any, opportunities has this conflict unearthed for artists to think and work differently? Both Max and Rachel are long-time members of the Asylum Arts network, now a part of The Neighborhood.
This event is free to attend.
About the speakers:
Rachel Mars is an award winning performance maker and writer based in London. She has been making work for fifteen years, exploring social and political formations and their personal intersections. Her live metalwork installation FORGE saw her remake the Dachau camp ‘Welcome’ gate to explore monument, memorial and historical inheritance. Her debut play-shaped work BLOOD PLAY was recently shortlisted for the Women’s Playwriting Prize and the Jewish Plays Project. Her solo ‘YOUR SEXTS ARE SHIT: OLDER BETTER LETTERS’ a Queer Archive of sex writing, played Under the Radar last year. OUR CARNAL HEARTS, a live choral dissection of envy, won a Total Theatre Award, and her company Mars.tarrab won the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Award, 2017 with their show ROLLER about female aggression and protest. She has shown and developed work around the UK and Internationally including at The Barbican, Southbank Centre, UMS Ann Arbor, Fusebox Festival, Austin, On The Boards, Seattle & Brisbane Festival. For screen, she was on the Writers Lab UK and Ireland screenwriting programme 2021, The Royal Court x Sister Pictures Development scheme, and a finalist on 4Stories in 2022.
Max Czollek is a poet, publicist and political scientist. He received his doctorate from the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technische Universität Berlin and is particularly well known for his theatrical and essayistic work surrounding memory culture, integration and Jewish identity in post-war Germany. Theaters works include De-Integration. A Congress on contemporary Jewish positions and the Days of Radical Jewish Culture at Maxim Gorki Theater as well as the international Days of Jewish-Muslim Hegemony. His essays Desintegriert Euch! (Disintegrate!) and Gegenwartsbewältigung (Overcoming the Present) are published with Carl Hanser Verlag, his collections of poetry at Verlagshaus Berlin. He is co-editor of the magazine Jalta – Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart. (Yalta – Positions on the Jewish Present) and guest curator for the exhibition “Revenge – History and Fantasie” that opening in March 2022 at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt/Main.
Photo credits: Ben Wilkin (Rachel) and Marek Eggemann (Max)
