Raphael Urweider and Patrick Savolainen
Raphael Urweider is a poet, playwright and translator who also works as a director, rapper and musician. He has published three volumes of poetry, Lichter in Menlo Park, Das Gegenteil von Fleisch, and Alle deine Namen, and has written numerous plays, among others together with Samuel Schwarz, Meret Matter and Matto Kämpf. Urweider has translated several plays, volumes of poetry and opera librettos from English, French and Swiss German. From 2008 to 2010, he was artistic co-director of Schlachthaus Theater Bern, and from 2013 to 2016, president of the authors’ association AdS. For his poetry, he has won, among others, the Leonce and Lena Prize, the 3sat Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition in Klagenfurt, and the Clemens Brentano Prize. Urweider has already worked as a mentor at the Swiss Literary Institute in Biel, in the Theatre Department and in the Master of Contemporary Arts Practice at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB).
Patrick Savolainen (1988*) works as a graphic designer and freelance author. He studied literary writing, visual communication, and philosophy and aesthetics in Biel, Bern and Karlsruhe. His most recent publication as a poet: poems in the anthology Lyrik von Jetzt 3 (Wallstein); as a radio play author: Im Ausseralpinen (SRF2); as a novelist: Farantheiner (Die Brotsuppe).
Project
The individual cycles within it are grouped around tools, inventions, personalities, and foodstuff. The poems are often based on objects that actually exist, which later seek to have poems that actually exist as their foundation. The poetic potential is assumed to lie between the tellability and untellability of these objects, people and events: in observation, in facts, biographical artefacts, what is thought up, invented, etc. The linguistic morass, the terminological surroundings of the concepts, provides the respective poems with a possible set of rules. Using a pear (Gute Luise) to find out more about tastes in general and, more specifically, about the kinship between its slightly rotten sweetness and a burning carcass is, for example, one result of this undertaking.