Unbehagen / Malaise / Unease
22. & 29. August 2026

LJ Jeschke
Jonas von Lenthe
Aodhan Madden
Nathalie Quintane
Shola von Reinhold
Monika Rinck
Théo Robine-Langlois
Keston Sutherland
Anna Zett

Organised with Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff
Set by Concert Series 1
In the reading room of Kunst Museum & Naturmuseum Winterthur

Unbehagen Malaise Unease brings together poets and artists whose work resists settling into a single language, medium, or form, and whose practices move across contexts. The festival takes place in the reading room (Lesesaal) of Kunst Museum and Naturmuseum Winterthur, a former library, which for the duration of the festival acts both as an exhibition and a stage designed by the artist collective Concert Series 1. A programme of readings, talks and performances in three different languages – French, German and English – will take place on the last two Saturdays of August, the 22nd and the 29th; in between, from the 24th to the 28th, the space remains open as both exhibition room and bookshop.

The festival originated against the backdrop of institutional unease with poetic and artistic practices whose outcomes resist determination or immediate usefulness. Working against the increasing pressure to produce clarity, impact and efficiency, the festival argues instead for modes of making, thinking or even being that are in process. The instrumentalisation of uncertainty by anti-democratic politics is not the subject of our festival, but it is an important motivation: uncertainty is increasingly mobilised as something to be eliminated or strategically exploited. Either way, manufactured certainty and fixed stance become an attitude and a method. Against this, the festival argues for a productive, exploratory form of uncertainty, one that resists exactly the kind of reasoning such politics depend on.

We assume that poetry is an unstable thing. It operates in the logic of the material world, for which an outward gesture, often one toward an object, is necessary. At the same time, it is part of the symbolic world, a turn inward. In both, it must be lacking in order to spur desire, and this instability is the condition that allows it to generate interpretation. If poetry is on one end of a spectrum ranging from open-ended to clear and effective meaning, an authoritarian rhetoric seeks to occupy the opposite. One attempts to break with the conformity that is at the base of language, the other to confirm it.

This is the question all contributors to this festival pursue in their own way: what political potential does poetry hold precisely because it refuses the clarity political speech demands? An initial departure point for this question was Anne Boyer’s poem How to Go From (1) & How to Go From (2) which asks how one gets from A (poetry, text) to B (art, object) and back again – not as opposing categories but as forms that continually translate into one another. The pieces gathered here admit, in this sense, to their incompleteness and reject direction. Some mimic manuals, instructions, statistics and handbooks that promise empowerment, and point to the irony in the appeal of such genres. In this refusal to resolve, the question the festival opened with returns, unanswered: not what poetry means, but what it might still do.

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Programme

Saturday 22nd of August, from 3pm to 6pm
Readings & performances by LJ Jeschke, Jonas von Lenthe & Anna Zett
In German and English

Saturday 29th of August, from 2pm to 5pm
Readings & performances by Aodhan Madden, Nathalie Quintane, Shola von Reinhold & Théo Robine-Langlois
In English and French

Free admission. No registration required. Drinks & snacks provided.

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