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.

 *

Programme on
Saturday 22nd of August
3pm to 6pm

In German

3pm / LJ Jeschke
LJ Jeschke is a writer, artist, and performer based in Munich. For Unbehagen Malaise Unease, Jeschke reads from the new poetry collection 1e*r schreibt sich in den Abgrund. Sammlung der Gedichte, published by hochroth München in 2026. Jeschke presents a practice in which language is not only a carrier of meaning, but also material, voice, and performative action. Publications have appeared, among others, with Merve and in artist’s editions; works and performances have been presented, among others, at Lenbachhaus Munich and at HKW Berlin.

4pm / Jonas von Lenthe
Jonas von Lenthe has prepared a lecture on the political potential of publishing practice. He will talk about historical examples and his own work with Wirklichkeit Books, which he founded in Berlin in 2019, with titles including Rejected. Designs for the European Flag and the German translation of Enzo Traverso's Gaza Faces History. From 2022 to 2024 he served as head archivist at Kunstverein München. He works as research assistant at the Critical Media Lab in Basel, where he co-edits the essay series What Is Critical Publishing? together with Lucie Kolb.

5pm / Anna Zett
Anna Zett's contribution is titled “The Four Aces”. There Zett presents the four aces from their continuously growing modernist tarot deck adaption “System in crisis”, which is thematically tied to the Weimar Republic. “The Four Aces” is also the name of a well-known card trick. Is this deck a tool for play, analysis or performance? Anna Zett has worked with the voice as medium for years – in videos, radio plays, group improvisation, performance scores, the card deck as script. In 2019, her first book, the text collection Artificial Gut Feeling, was published by Divided Publishing. Since 2024 Zett co-hosts the Class for Performative Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB). Anna Zett is an artist and writer and lives in Berlin.

*

Programme on
Saturday 29th of August
2pm to 5pm

In English and French

2pm / Shola von Reinhold
Shola von Reinhold is a writer and artist based in Glasgow. For Unbehagen Malaise Unease, she continues her engagement with the motif of the grotto as a place of retreat. Von Reinhold’s performance opens up a space in which meanings are not fixed, but continually translated into one another through sound, ornamental form, and chance. Von Reinhold’s debut novel LOTE was published by Jacaranda Books in 2020 and in a German translation by LJ Jeschke – also a guest in the Kunsthalle’s programme – by Merve in 2024. Her work has been published and presented, among others, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and in London and Berlin.

2.45pm / Aodhan Madden
Aodhan Madden is a writer and artist based in Paris. For Unbehagen Malaise Unease, they present a selection of texts and a song that move between topics as diverse as exoplanets, hyperpop, the “dark side,” and fathers. The performance is complemented by a slide from the lecture Déterminisme et stochasticité en formation planétaire by the astronomer Alessandro Morbidelli, which Madden interprets as a quilt – a textile form of assembling, translating, and rearranging. With writer Star Finch, Madden edits Tongue Ring, a review concerned with translation the publishing and translation of experimental texts between French and English. Most recently, they have realised performances, among others, in collaboration with Mimosa Echard.

3.30pm / Nathalie Quintane
Nathalie Quintane has developed a zine, from which she reads – the texts draw on the Denig Manuscript, an illuminated devotional book made in 1784 by the Pennsylvania German shoemaker Ludwig Denig, now held at Winterthur Museum in Delaware. Her writing has long taken ordinary objects and scenes as its starting point. In her most recent book, Soixante-dix fantômes (La Fabrique), she records what she calls "flashs fascistes" – fascist moments spotted within normal life. She also teaches French at a collège in Digne-les-Bains, where she lives. Nathalie Quintane is a poet and writer.

4pm / Théo Robine-Langlois
Théo Robine-Langlois has translated paintings by Vallotton into German-French poems. They hang in the room the way the paintings would, and he also reads them aloud – image and word colliding literally, as in the rest of his work. He is co-founder of After 8 Books and Publication Studio Paris. His most recent book, Crue, was published by Dépense Défensive. Théo Robine-Langlois is an artist and author and lives in Clamart, Île-de-France.

*

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

*

The festival was supported by Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung & Stiftung Temperatio.