Writer-in-Residence of the City of Graz, Austria 2023-24

Jury Statement 
Born in New York in 1960, Andrea Scrima is no stranger to the art world. After studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York and at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, where she has lived and worked since 1984, her artworks have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. Scrima has always maintained a close link to writing: through the literary criticism and essays she has published over the years, and through her large-scale text installations—essentially short stories applied to walls—that dominated her artistic work from 2000 on and that navigate the viewer’s perception by merging textual content and choreography. With the publication of A Lesser Day in 2010, Scrima made her celebrated debut as a literary author. The book takes the narrator’s past as the starting point for an artist’s biography, tracing the paths taken, revisiting memories, creating space for the erratic, and allowing for lacunae—imbued throughout by a poetic sensibility and by a gaze that generates atmosphere through its descriptive observations. This novel in fragmentary form can also, however, be read as an inquiry into the substance of any identity, of any life. Eight years later, the renowned Droschl Verlag in Graz published an excellent German translation titled Wie viele Tage. 
In 2021, Droschl published Scrima’s second book: Like Lips, Like Skins (in German Kreisläufe, translated from the American by Christian von der Goltz and the author herself), in which she once again demonstrates her impressive narrative skills. In telling a family’s history, she focuses on various types of trauma: the damage young people suffered in the disciplinary institutions of the former East Germany as well as the trauma that arises from voluntary ties. In the process, Scrima assembles various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle—memories, facts, the imagined—into a compelling portrait of an existence.
Scrima, editor-in-chief of the English-language literary magazine StatORec, submitted a project that takes as its point of departure her research into her family’s Arbëresh origins; the focus, however, widens considerably to include immigrant groups everywhere. The work-in-progress is a collection of essays titled Displaced, which explores uprootedness, repression, mental illness, and the gradual loss of a mother tongue among migrants of the second and third generation.

To read the original German version, click here.

Many thanks to the Kulturressort of the City of Graz and the Kulturvermittlung Steiermark for making this fellowship possible.

Photo: Antonio Maria Storch

Ein Mahnmal, das uns in unserem Alltag überfällt

„Nein“: Ein Wort des Protests, das mein eigenes Schweigen direkt anzusprechen schien

The Kleine Zeitung invited me to write a column as Writer-in-Residence of the city of Graz, Austria 2023/24—I will eventually translate these into English, but here they are in German.

Artist in Exile: Jonas Mekas and a Moment in Lost, Lost, Lost

Read the essay in the Berlin-based film journal Cargo.

“My very first need was I should document the life of immigrants,” Mekas relates in a film recorded in 1992 on the occasion of an exhibition in Turin. Newly arrived in New York, struggling to get by and increasingly aware that he would not be returning to Lithuania any time soon, he was disgusted by popular American movies like Fred Zinneman’s THE SEARCH, which depicted immigrants and displaced persons, but which he found “naïve and ridiculous and did not really show how it is.” He decided to “show them how it really is.” For more than twenty years, however, Mekas was unable to revisit the material he shot during that early period.

Originally, he and Adolfas had conceived the film as an outcry against the fact that the West had sacrificed the Baltic Republics to the USSR at Yalta. While LOST, LOST, LOST, the work he eventually made from the footage, documents everyday life among exiled Lithuanians, it eludes interpretation and moves through multiple narrative dimensions. We hear Mekas in voiceover, punctuated by pages of his written diaries from the time and intertitles that include an announcement of an émigré’s first paycheck; images of big-hearted Ginkas in a white apron standing in front of his candy store on Grand Street; the baptism of the infant Paulius Landsbergis; a committee meeting for an independent Lithuania; the arrival in Washington of Povilas Žadeikis, ambassador to the formerly independent Lithuania. When Mekas decided that the only hope for the country resided in the people who still lived there, he and Adolfas moved to Manhattan and threw themselves into a new mission: to make up for the “decade of cultural life of this civilization” that they’d missed, to «catch up immediately with everything.” For two years, Mekas recalls in the Turin film, he and his brother attended every new film screening, every theater performance, every opera in New York, and the rest, of course, is film history and the birth of the avant-garde New American Cinema. But then Mekas suddenly breaks down in tears and covers his face with both hands. Minutes pass before he is able to collect himself. He finishes his beer, raises the bottle to the camera, and smiles. When he realizes that the cameraman has not stopped filming, he takes off his microphone and gets up from the couch.

What was he remembering at that moment?

Read the essay in the Berlin-based film journal Cargo.

ORF

Nice little highlight on Austrian TV:

Here it is in the ORF Videothek (in German language).

Writer-in-Residence Andrea Scrima: “I’ll be living here like a Graz native”

“[. . .] Im Moment arbeitet die Künstlerin und Schriftstellerin an zwei Werken, wovon im Laufe ihrer Stadtschreiberinnen-Zeit hier mindestens eines zu Ende gebracht werden soll. Die darin behandelten Themen reichen bis ins 15. Jahrhundert ihrer eigenen Familiengeschichte zurück und sind im Risorgimento Süditaliens zu finden. In jenem Buch – für dessen Idee Scrima das Stipendium des Grazer Kulturamts erhielt – wird es neben der Internetrecherche nach den Spuren der Vorfahren auch um die mit den politischen Folgen der Risorgimento verbundenen Ursachen der großen Immigrationswellen von Süditalien in die USA gehen. Parallel dazu wird aus den vielen Geschichten und Schicksalen, von denen sie in diesem Rahmen zu erzählen weiß, eine Essaysammlung entstehen. Unter dem Titel “Displaced” wird sie sich so dem großen Thema der Entwurzelung annehmen und eine Art Zusatzmaterial zum Buch veröffentlichen.”

“[. . .] At the moment, the writer and artist is working on two books simultaneously, one of which she hopes to complete in the course of her time in Graz as the city’s writer-in-residence. Her theme originates in the Risorgimento and her family’s history, which dates back to the 15th century; the focus here is on the remaining traces of her ancestors in documents online and elsewhere, as well as the huge waves of Southern Italian immigrants to the US in the aftermath of Italian Unification. Parallel to this book, Scrima is working on an essay collection comprising a wide range of interrelated stories. Titled Displaced, the collection’s overriding theme is uprootedness; it will be published as a companion volume to the book on Southern Italian immigration.”

Read the article (in German language) here.

The Shameless Gaze

The following essay published on Three Quarks Daily—“The Shameless Gaze”—is about the power differential in the relationship between artists and art patrons:

“Art, we remind ourselves, always exists in close proximity to power and its inherent brutality. Oddly, a civilization’s greatness or lack thereof is often judged less by the cruelty of its social organization or economy than the degree to which it enables art to prosper. Art was once believed to express the loftiest thoughts and sentiments human beings are capable of; whatever art has come to mean today, it has retained a good deal of its cultural agency. But while the relationship between artist and patron can, on the surface, seem mutually beneficial and gratifying, it is deception and mystique that it deals in—giving rise to the trickster, the poseur, and the sycophant—, because regardless of the cultural capital art is perceived to be, and the fact that wealth is keen to associate itself with it, the inherent asymmetry in power between artist and patron precludes any possibility of a negotiation on equal terms. The artist needs to play along to survive. As long as one sticks to the script, according to which the patron is noble and the artist grateful, all is well. But the moment one steps aside and questions the terms of transaction, punishment arrives. Because the power is, and will always remain on the side of the very wealthy.”

Read it here.

Eugenics and the Biological Justification of Economic Exploitation in Southern Italy

Three Quarks Daily has just published a new excerpt from a work-in-progress of mine on the roots of early twentieth-century eugenicist thought and its impact on US immigration—and its unlikely roots in Southern Italy post-Risorgimento.

“The criminologist Cesare Lombroso, a former army surgeon and head of an insane asylum who became professor of forensic medicine and hygiene in 1878, professor of psychiatry in 1896, and professor of criminal anthropology in 1906, held that the people of the South were ‘evolutionary throwbacks’ lacking in Aryan blood. According to this theory, a congenital inferiority forestalled the mental and emotional development of Southern Italians and was largely to blame for their historical backwardness. Criminality, and particularly the criminality of the South, was therefore hereditary, and identifiable through a specific set of physical traits in keeping with an earlier state of human evolution. Ape-like features such as a low-set brow, long arms, protruding jaw, and other anatomical peculiarities—atavistic anomalies of the body that were closer to a ‘savage,’ animal state—unmistakably identified the ‘born criminal.’”

Read the essay here.

“Wordscapes” at the Taos Center for the Arts

In April 2023, at the end of a three-month residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, I and four other residents put on a collaborative performance of music and words at the Taos Center for the Arts. In the background: composer of contemporary music Shiuan Chang.

One week earlier, I read from my novel Like Lips, Like Skins at another event, this one at the Blumenschein Home and Museum—you can see a video of this reading here.

Rebellion

I’ve published another essay up on Three Quarks Daily, or rather, an excerpt from a book I’m working on. 

It’s about immigration, labor, and the role ethnic identity plays in holding back children of the working class. Cameo appearances by Didier Eribon (and his book Returning to Reims) and Arturo Giovanitti, the famous socialist poet who inspired the exhausted workers of the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912 to carry on. 

It begins with one of my own experiences as the daughter of the youngest son of an Italian fruit peddler in the South Bronx of the twenties and thirties. 

“When Eribon sketched out the political developments in France over the past fifty years, it was to clarify the process by which the traditionally left-wing French working class gradually abandoned the Socialist Party, which had long been ignoring their interests, and embraced the National Front. The rhetoric of the radical right—anti-intellectual, anti-liberal, anti-solidarity, anti-immigration—spoke directly to the disaffected and disenfranchised, who welcomed the chance to recover their pride and didn’t seem to register that the party’s policies essentially exacerbated their economic plight. And in a cruel twist, when their children beat the odds and managed to get an education and make something of themselves, they often accused them of being just like ‘the people upstairs’—the ones pulling the strings and making the decisions. Not only did their parents show indifference to their achievements; they were quick to remind them not to let it ‘get to their heads’ or to imagine they were anything ‘better.’”

Musings on Exile, Immigrants, Pre-Unification Berlin, Trauma, Naturalization, and a Native Tongue

I decided to write a bit about coming to Berlin in the early 1980s—and what the city felt like back then to foreigners. The first time I came to Berlin was in ’83, 38 years after WWII ended. I moved here one year later and stayed. 1983 is a midway point in history for me, because now, in 2022, I’ve been living in the city for 38 years, in other words: I am as far in time from the year I first arrived here as that moment was from the end of the war—which was, in many ways, still present and very palpable.

Whenever I try to understand how history is rewritten, I think of these “time bridges” and recall overhearing a conversation between an elderly couple in a diner somewhere uptown on Lexington Ave. many years ago. I don’t recall the precise marker the man used, but I heard him saying: “that’s exactly as far back in time as that time was from the Civil War.” The time bridge, for want of a better word, connected him to what had once seemed to him a kind of pre-history. Come to think of it, that marker was quite likely the year he was born.

For me, growing up in the US, WWII was also a kind of pre-history—but as the decades accrue, and the mind tries to sort them out, that war—in light of the current war—feels closer than ever.

The essay is titled “Musings on Exile, Immigrants, Pre-Unification Berlin, Trauma, Naturalization, and a Native Tongue”—it’s about those first few years, the mental health crisis among refugees, applying for German citizenship, and what happens when multi-generational memory is no longer passed down through a parent’s native language.

Read it on 3 Quarks Daily

Writing and Remembering

Coming on October 16, 2022 at 7:30 p.m.: Lettrétage in der Veteranenstraße 21, Berlin-Mitte

Reading and Conversation with Lilian Peter and Andrea Scrima (in German language)

Wie schreibt sich Erinnerung? Was bedeutet es, erzählend zu erinnern oder erinnernd zu erzählen? Wie bahnt sich das, was wir „Erinnerung“ nennen, seine Wege in literarische Texte? Wie lässt sich über (Familien-) Traumata schreiben, über Dinge also, von denen niemand mehr erzählen kann, die aber dennoch transgenerationale Kraft ausüben und auf irgendeine Weise erzählt zu werden verlangen? Lässt sich der Körper mit seinen vielfachen Erfahrungsschichten „freischreiben“? Und welche literarischen Formen generiert ein solcher Ansatz?

Was heute als „Autofiktion“ in aller Munde ist und sehr modern klingt, ist in Wirklichkeit eine der ältesten Formen von Literatur überhaupt; zugleich ist die Erinnerung, genauer der erinnerte (nach innen genommene) Körper, in der europäischen Kulturgeschichte immer ein weiblicher. Andrea Scrima und Lilian Peter lesen aus ihren aktuellen Büchern, KREISLÄUFE und MUTTER GEHT AUS, und gehen im anschließenden Gespräch diesen und vielen anderen Fragen nach, mit denen sich auch ihre Bücher in unterschiedlichen Formen, Prosa und Essay, auseinandersetzen.

Click here for details.

Laïcité and the Gap of Cultural Assimilation

The situation felt primal, imminently violent; distant epigenetic memories of war and bloodlust shivered in my veins. Turn the music off, I shouted, the lyrics are misogynistic. The truth was, there was no time to even consider what they might have been about in any larger sense; the music was sudden-onslaught deafening, terms for female genitals were thundering throughout a public space occupied mostly by excited, electrified young men: to be a woman in this scenario was to feel under threat in a way that was simple and visceral. 

Read an essay on cultural assimilation in Europe, the appropriation of American Black subculture by minorities, and gaps in understanding on Three Quarks Daily.

Berlin Between: Parataxe Symposium

From Gesa Stedman’s beautiful Berlin keynote to Donna Stonecipher, Lucy Jones, Ben Ferguson, Crista Siglin, Ann Cotten and many more, the entire Parataxe Symposium at the Literarisches Colloquium is now online in digital form.

I read from my novel Like Lips, Like Skins (German edition: Kreisläufe) in German and English, and before that had a talk with our brilliant moderator Shane Anderson about Berlin, about going from being a visual artist to becoming a writer, about the difficulties of translation, about what Berlin was like in the ’80s and what it’s like for young people facing the housing market in Berlin today.

From 39:10.

Check out the Stadtsprachen website for videos of all the panels.

The Slovenes of Lienz-Peggetz

This past spring, I found myself sitting, masked, at a wooden desk among a scattering of scientific researchers at the Museo Galileo in Florence. Next to me was a thick reference book on the history of astronomical instruments and a smaller work on the sundials and other measuring devices built into the churches of Florence to mark the cyclical turning points of cosmic time. The gnomon of Santa Maria del Fiore, for instance, consisted of a bronzina, a small hole set into the lantern ninety meters above that acted as a camera oscura and projected an image of the sun onto the cathedral floor far below. At noon on the day of the solstice, the solar disc superimposed itself perfectly onto a round marble slab, not quite a yard in diameter, situated along the inlaid meridian. I studied the explanations of astronomical quadrants and astrolabes and the armilla equinoziale,the armillary sphere of Santa Maria Novella, made up of two conjoined iron rings mounted on the façade that told the time of day and year based on the position of their elliptical shadow, when all at once it occurred to me that I’d wanted to write about something else altogether, about a person I occasionally encountered, a phantom living somewhere inside me: the young woman who’d decided not to leave, not to move to Berlin after all, to rip up the letter of acceptance to the art academy she received all those years ago and to stay put, in New York. Alive somewhere, in some other iteration of being, was a parallel existence in an alternative universe, one of the infinite spheres of possibility in which I’d decided differently and become a different woman.

Not long before this, a friend in Graz had told me that she’d been born on American soil and so, theoretically at least, was an American citizen. She’d never lived there, however, and this was her ghost, her own parallel existence. In July of 1950, her parents had sailed from Bremerhaven to New York on the United States Army Transport W.G. Haan, a ship of displaced persons that had been reacquired by the Navy and enlisted in the Military Sea Transportation Service. Their intention was to emigrate; they’d applied for their visas, all their papers were in order, and yet they were refused entry and caught in limbo for more than a year before being sent back to Europe. My friend was born in this limbo, on Ellis Island.

The first time she’d decided to research the ship manifests and to see what information she could find about her parents’ voyage and subsequent internment, she stumbled, one might say improbably, on a photograph of her mother, taken aboard the ship, posted online by the Immigration History Research Center Archives of the University of Minnesota Libraries. It was part of a series a Latvian passenger named Uģis Skrastiņš had taken to document his trip after leaving a displaced persons camp in Meersbeck, Germany, before eventually resettling in Minneapolis. The collection held a total of 87 photographs recording trains arriving, passengers disembarking, and people standing in line on a dock, waiting to board with manila tags attached to the buttons of their coats, blankets strapped to the suitcases resting on the pavement next to them. People crowded the ship’s deck, near-silhouettes against the churning, metallic-looking water below; crew members handled ropes as thick as their arms, with heavy black smoke curling upwards from another ship’s funnel behind them, and everywhere the latticework of huge metal cranes ready to haul up cargo. Again and again, I came back to the photograph of my friend’s mother. She was smiling, her eyes were downcast, and she seemed to be unaware that she was being photographed; her smile was private, reserved for my friend’s father, the man in the foreground with his back turned to us and his head slightly tilted, also smiling. It was July, and while the ocean air must have had a nip to it, as the people in the photograph were wearing coats, my friend’s mother was wearing hers open. She was two weeks pregnant with my friend; presumably, she didn’t yet know this. Her hair was in place, as was her husband’s: the day was not particularly windy, and two women seated in the background, one of them with a kerchief tied under her chin, seemed to be enjoying the sea air.

xxx

— read an excerpt from a new book-in-progress on Three Quarks Daily.

xxx