Events | Ceremony - The Sanctuary. Art and Literature from Exile and Hermitage
Los Angeles | November 6, 2021
in person /
Personal participation: RSVP required /
Proof of vaccination or test required /
520 Paseo Miramar, LA, CA 90272/
Start of event: 3:00 pm / Admission: 2:00 pm /
shuttle will be running throughout the event from Los Liones Drive
On November 6, we will finally be able to celebrate the Villa’s 25th anniversary in-person. The event featuring Hanno Leichtmann (Villa Aurora composer-in-residence 2018), Kevin Vennemann (Villa Aurora writer-in-residence 2008), and Stefan Keppler-Tasaki (Thomas Mann Fellow 2019) will also kick off our symposium “The Sanctuary. Art and Literature from Exile and Hermitage.” We could not be more excited to reconnect with those who went with us through thick and thin and introduce new friends to our program.
3:00 pm:
Marianne Heuwagen, Deputy Chairwoman Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House
Stefan Schneider, Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany
Marje Schuetze-Coburn, Associate Dean USC Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, Faculty Affairs; Dean of Research, Co-Head, East Asian Library
Steven D. Lavine, President Emeritus CalArts, Chairman Thomas Mann House Advisory Board
3:15 pm The Sanctuary: Session 1
Stefan Keppler-Tasaki: 25 Years of Literature from the Villa Aurora, a Sanctuary of Exile and a Gateway to California
Q&A moderated by Michaela Ullmann
Reading by Kevin Vennemann: Sunset Boulevard: Vom Filmen, Bauen und Sterben in Los Angeles
Q&A moderated by Stefan Keppler-Tasaki
4:30 pm coffee break
5:00 pm: Introduction of current Villa Aurora artists-in-residence Ulu Braun (film), Anna Sofie Hartmann (film), Sarah Szczesny (visual art), and Isabelle Stever (film)
5:15 pm: Hanno Leichtmann (Villa Aurora composer-in-residence 2018): OUTERLANDS, live performance of a composition made exclusively with sounds recorded inside the Villa Aurora cinema organ and a 4-channel backing tape
Stefan Keppler-Tasaki
Stefan Keppler-Tasaki, born 1973 in Wertheim am Main, studied German Literature at the Julius Maximilian’s University Würzburg and received his doctorate in 2005 on the topic of “Limits of the Self” in Goethe's narrative fiction. From 2002 to 2008, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Würzburg and the Free University of Berlin, subsequently Junior Professor at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of the FU. In 2012, he was appointed to a tenure-track professorship for Modern German Literature at the University of Tokyo and has lived in the Japanese capital since then.
His work focuses on Goethe and on exile writers (Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, etc.), especially from the angle of the history of ideas and of inter-media studies. Also, he repeatedly occupied himself with the history of NS ideology, not least in his region of origin in the southwest of Germany.
During his student and doctorate years, Stefan was a scholarship holder of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. From 2015 onwards, the Einstein Foundation Berlin supported his research cooperation between the Free University of Berlin and the University of Tokyo through a five-year Einstein Visiting Fellowship. In 2019, he was also a fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. He is a member of the Berlin based Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities – Doing Literature in a Global Perspective".
Kevin Vennemann
Kevin Vennemann teaches at Scripps College in Claremont, CA, and lives in Los Angeles. Recent publications include the study "Die Welt vom Rücken des Kranichs. Thermodynamik und der Verfall einer Familie" (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2020).
Hanno Leichtmann
Hanno Leichtmann got his start in improvised music, but has focused on electronic music since 1998. With his solo project “Static”, he released several albums and toured the world. In 2011, Leichtmann released the “lost” Soundtrack for Christoph Schlingensief’s last film "African Twintowers" (zuletzt aufgeführt bei der CTM 2016 im HAU 1). As a member of the trio “Groupshow”, he has set to music the eight hour long Andy Warhol “Empire” on several different occasions. Since 2008, he has regularly curated festivals and club series, such as Letra / Tone – Festival for graphic arts and music and SYN / CUSSION - Festival for percussion and electronics. Since 2013, Leichtmann has worked primarily as a sound artist, using sound archives as sounds set for new works. His extensive work “Nouvelles Aventures” was presented during the International Summer School for New Music. Leichtmann’s percussive sound installation “Skin, Wood, Traps”, created during a residency in Wellington, New Zealand, was presented at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. During his 2018 residency at Villa Aurora, he developed a six-channel sound installation for dance company Sasha Waltz & Guests which premiered in Berlin that same year. Leichtmann is co-curator, with Caroline Brandl, of the festival SCULPTURE – Sculptural Concepts for Choreography and Music. In October 2021, Leichtmann presented his sound installation SECULUM at the Donaueschinger Musiktage. In 2021, he also founded an exclusive fashion label (in Ponta do Sol, Madeira) which is distributed at the legendary boutique Nova Minerva in Madeira’s capital Funchal.
Hanno Leichtmann lives and works in Berlin and Ponta do Sol, Madeira.
