Ivna Žic and Erika Do Nascimento
Photo: Katharina Manojlovic
Ivna Žic, *1986, studied Applied Theatre Studies, Drama Directing and Scenic Writing in Gießen, Hamburg and Graz. She is a freelance author and director at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, Schauspielhaus Wien, Lucerne Theatre and Theater Neumarkt, amongst others. Her debut novel ‘Die Nachkommende’ was published in 2019 (Berlin, Matthes & Seitz). It has been nominated for both the Austrian and the Swiss Book Prize, received the Terra Nova Prize of the Swiss Schiller Foundation and the Anna Seghers Prize. She has been part of the management team at the HORA theatre in Zurich since 2020. She sees mentoring as a dialogue in which people should think confidently, critically and, above all, precisely. She believes that, in addition to silent writing work, writing processes can take new (re)paths through sustained dialogue and joint reading.
Photo: ZVG
Erika Do Nascimento, born in 1992 in St Miguel do Taipú, Brazil, spent the first years of her life growing up in the countryside in north-east Brazil. She then moved to Switzerland. At the age of fourteen, she went back to Brazil and lived in the Complexo da Maré in Rio de Janeiro for four years. She attended a course at O Teatro Tablado, a theatre in Rio. She moved back to Switzerland when she was eighteen. She worked as a sales assistant, barista, call agent, order picker (organising salads) and service employee. In 2015, she began an apprenticeship in catering, completing it in 2018. In 2021, she completed her Bachelor’s degree in Literary Writing at the Swiss Literature Institute and is now writing an autofictional novel about identity and origin. She also works as a museum supervisor, lives in Biel and raps in Portuguese.
Project
Contrasts and fragments are mixed, past and present flow into one another. A world of memories and fiction is constructed, a childhood and youth are remembered and travelled through in narrative form. The novel is an attempt to exist in several worlds, in several places at the same time: in Brazil, in Switzerland, and in between. The first-person narrator often imagines what it would be like to go from one place to another in one step, until she is shaken awake and realises that there is an ocean and an expensive ticket between these worlds, as well as constant change. No matter where she is, she misses the other.
I would like to revise existing texts and produce new texts and discuss them together. I would also like to work with deadlines to move the project forward and find methods to create a routine. To sharpen my ear in relation to my text, I would like to read passages of text aloud and hear my mentor read some passages aloud.
