Welcome to the Bridging the Tongues Festival 2021 !
This year, we bring a unique festival to the literary scene in Vienna that focuses on multilingual writing and story telling!
We’re staging a hybrid festival with exciting in person and online events featuring international and Vienna based authors. The Live Special Preview takes place at Brunnenpassage Vienna on September 8, 9, and 10. If in town, we happily welcome you to be part of our literary exchanges. Check the 3-day programme and register for free.
The entire festival programme will be premiered online on our website between September 23-25. Check out the programme and register for free. You will receive a link on the day of the event.
We have prepared manifold formats where you can take part in: from readings to lectures, from workshops to discursive-lines, to literary walks and radio programmes. And we are excited to welcome you to our various events!
Bridging the Tongues Festival invites various Viennese speech communities to celebrate together their authors. We welcome both second & multilingual authors, as well as multilingual speech enthusiasts who are eager to experiment with vibrant languages in the city.
The goal of the festival is to celebrate the experimental and innovative character of multilingualism. We intend to make the cultural speech landscapes in Vienna visible and to strengthen their connectivity to the progressive discourses in the global culture. The festival advances an inclusive understanding of literature which goes beyond the consecrated written form and proposes easily accessible, oral and performative formats.
All festival events are accessible free of cost. Registration is required.
Free Registration
Bridging The Tongues Festival 2021
Why we think that Vienna needs such a festival
Ever more writers who are based in Vienna or in the German-speaking region work in literary languages other than German or write in many languages, German included. Their works address local and transnational audiences who mirror the multilingual character of the city. At the same time there are many young people living with more than one language in Vienna. Even a metropolis like Vienna lacks enough literary formats which can express this current and rich development of multilingualism.
Bridging the Tongues Festival provides the framework by which these voices and forms of expression become more visible and contributes to their involvement with the local literary establishment. Thus, the current transnational dimension of the city of Vienna forms the basis for the literary production.
Bridging The Tongues Festival 2021
Who is organising
Bridging the Tongues Festival is conceived and organised by kollektiv sprachwechsel: Literatur in der Zweitsprache*Literature in Second Language. We are a group of authors who write in German as a second or third language. The members are brought together by the fact that they are not socialized in German. Since 2016 kollektiv sprachwechsel organizes readings and public discussions on the topic of second language literature and has issued a publication on the same topic in 2018.
Bridging The Tongues Festival 2021
Partners
Bridging the Tongues Festival is made possible thanks to our partners.
The festival is funded by SHIFT! and organised in partnership with Brunnenpassage, Volkskundemuseum Wien and Radio Orange.
Different artistic and cultural mediators with special interest in community art projects are also involved in the project. Many thanks also to Sabine Marte who drew the wonderful illustration “Gulp it down” for us which can be seen in all our festival-visuals.