My weapon is writing?

When adomas danusevicius first went for a walk along the regnitz river, he noticed the auberge’s usual grasses. And he must have been a little enchanted or at least inspired. Immediately he rushed to the director of the kunstlerhaus where he currently lives. To ask nora gomringer what she thinks about bamberg’s fabulous creatures.
Danusevicius is a painter and scholarship holder of the villa concordia. He will live here for eleven months. In this time he wants to search for water creatures among other things. A "magical camp is to be created, he calls it, whereby the concept will be ironically broken again. One can be curious.
Even the director is not yet sure what she means by an ironic "magical camp" has to present. On tuesday evening, it will introduce the new cohort of artists who have moved into the villa, germans and lithuanians. 15 in total, 11 are here today.
Lithuania is the guest country, which will enrich the city culturally in the coming months. Lithuania, the southernmost of the baltic states. Lithuania, the country of – and as a bamberger, the only thing that comes to mind off the top of my head is actually basketball players. No wonder, after all, basketball, says marius ivaskevicius, is one of two religions in his homeland.
The second is the theater. And because he wasn’t rough enough himself, he jokes, he became a playwright and screenwriter. For about four years, ivaskevicius, born in 1973, has seen himself as a political writer. There was a key moment: he was sitting in a hotel room and saw on television that there was a war in ukraine. "I asked myself, how can I make a film about love??" And: "i could kill? Is my weapon writing?" A war, he had learned, lasts about four years in this day and age. Bamberg is to become its demilitarized zone.
A church window as a target
For another hoard, bamberg feels like utopia: heiner blum came to bamberg for the first time about 30 years ago to dance in a new-wave club here. The next day he visited the cathedral, realized there was something to see here, and fell in love. "I have already celebrated my birthday and new year’s eve here", says the professor for experimental spatial concepts. "It could be that I don’t want to leave at all."
Blum works graphically, roughly, often with typography. His dream is the design of a church window. So every artist, whether from the field of literature, music or visual arts, brings his or her own ideas, projects.
Two have one in front of them that is even rougher than art: tim freiwald, a picture-shredding painter, will become a father in bamberg. And birke bertelsmeier, composer, sits pregnant on the stage next to nora gomringer. How is it to compose with two brains, two hearts in the body?? Bertelsmeier grins: "the hormones are changing. One feels like another. And then composes like another." From her field, music, only she and baltakas vykintas are there today.
In october there is another change of apartment. Not everyone stays here for eleven months, there is also the possibility of a five-month fellowship.
Mayor andreas stark (SPD) had emphasized the value of cultural exchange, especially in times of rising nationalism, in his funeral speech. The value of this exchange for the artists becomes clear in the course of the evening. Baltakas, for example, already speaks german and describes himself as an artist between east and west.
Maybe the same goes for najem wali, writer, journalist, who was born in iraq and has been a german citizen since 1992. Many german colleagues were envious of him. Because in the meantime he can travel to his homeland again and move there as a native: "there you only need to throw a stone and you always hit a story."