Past Projects + Events
 Boston

Event archive of the Goethe-Institut Boston

Please find recordings and documentation of past events sorted by year.

2024

2024 was a busy year at the Goethe-Institut Boston: with more than 170 events we made good use of our beautiful Grand Hall featuring both ongoing series as well as new collaborations.

An important focus this year was around the topic migration and belonging. We supported the
major Harvard Art Museums exhibition Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation and
contextualized the exhibition with 7 events, where we hosted a variety of incredible guests, including author Fatma Aydemir, director Aslı Özarslan, the two Boston-based ensembles Trio Gaia and Ludovico Ensemble performing works by composers Mauricio Kagel, Clara Iannotta, Younghi Pagh-Paan and Sara Glojnarić, lecturers Alexander Ghedi Weheliye and Matthew D. Morrison, artist Hito Steyerl and migration researcher Mark Terkessidis, and writers Sharon Dodua Otoo and Nakia Hill. Not part of the series but also dealing with this topic was Maryam Zaree’s film Born in Evin.

Another focus in 2024 was the topic of decolonization. In this context, we worked with the ensemble Castle of our Skins and the South African composer Monthati Matsebe, the Brazilian activist Anita Ekman, as well as the two German authors Christoph Kloeble and Paul Plamper. The two Studio 170 resident artists Dzidzor Azaglo and Steph Davis (described below) and the participants in the Made in Germany series Nakia Hill, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye and Matthew D. Morrison also work in this thematic field.

A portion of our programming in 2024 also highlighted German Bundestag (SPD) on A Global Outlook: Germany in the World in cooperation with the American Council on Germany, climate change and climate policy. One invaluable contribution on this topic came from German climate activist Luisa Neubauer. As part of the regional podcast series foreign correspondent, she discussed environmental, political, and social developments in Germany and the U.S. with Bill McKibben. At another event, Luisa shared her very moving poetry in a performance with the local Lydian String Quartet (Beethoven meets Climate Justice in E-Flat Major). Additionally, our Power(s) of Water Festival was dedicated to raising awareness about water-related issues through art, technology, educational workshops, discussions, and more. Together with our partners from the Villa Albertine/Consulat général de France à Boston, we organized a day of water-related screenings, workshops, a VR Experience and panel at the Museum of Science and a concert at the Great Engines Hall of the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. In terms of literature, climate was a focus at the reading and discussion with historian Annette Kehnel from her book The Green Ages.

Studio 170 for Artists continued providing New England artists with opportunities to use the Goethe-Institut for creative projects and connect with Germany through travel stipends. Multi-media artist Erin Woodbrey’s installation recontextualized histories of gardening and explored essential life forms. Marimbist Steph Davis and cultural activist Dzidzor Azaglo addressed issues of memory and healing with an installation and performance layering poetry, proverbs, prayers, the sound of the marimba, and oral histories. And, travel stipends made it possible for two Klezmer musicians Akiva Jacobs and Rebecca MacInnes to connect with their Jewish ancestry and a diverse Klezmer scene in Germany.

With ten contemporary music and five experimental music (with partner Non-Event) concerts, our concert hall was in full use showcasing composers and musicians from Germany while featuring Boston-area ensembles. We also hosted the Berlin Philharmonic for a special chamber concert for local Music Educators that featured BP and BSO CEOs discussing their visions for community engagement.

We celebrated several anniversaries and remembrances in our programs this year: We reflected on the 100th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka, by discussing his life with the translator of his diaries, Ross Benjamin, and Kafka Scholar Veronika Tuckerová and showcasing the film Kafka Goes to the Movies.

1924 also saw the world's first radio play broadcast from Berlin, the anniversary of which we celebrated through a monthly radio play series. In addition to this, we organized an event for local schools with a live broadcast of the radio play Dienstbare Geister by Paul Plamper (see also Decolonization) and a subsequent talk.

We celebrated 70 years of German Films, Germany's film marketing agency and showed some of the most successful German films over the past seven decades with a film marathon weekend in June and at our popular outdoor Sommerkino screenings in August.
With a screening of Stella. A Life, we remembered the life of the German Jew Stella Goldschlag who handed over hundreds of fellow Jews to the Gestapo. In cooperation with the Harvard Film Archive we also remembered the German artist Dore O., one of Germany’s most prolific experimental filmmakers.

2023

2023 was the year that we used our beautifully renovated Grand Hall to full capacity, creating many memorable programs, above all Times Echo Live: An exploration of Music, War, and Memory. This remarkable four-concert series hosted by Boston Globe classical music critic Jeremy Eichler in October focused on his extraordinary book—Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance. Time's Echo Live at the Goethe-Institut was chosen as the best Boston musical event of the year by Musical America.

We continued old partnerships, like our collaboration with the Coolidge Corner Theatre on the German Film Series (now in its 17th year!), and Non Event, our experimental music partner of 15 years. Highlights included Boston debut performances by the Berlin-based trio Sawt Out , the experimental music group Beam Splitter from Berlin as well as sound artist poet and electronic music producer AGF (Antye Greie Ripatti). At the Coolidge, we screened the new film by Andreas Dresen, Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush followed by a live zoom interview with the director. In the fall we welcomed the star of Franky Five Star, Lena Urzendowsky live at the Coolidge. We also continued our partnership with the Boston Book Festival, this time highlighting the genre graphic novel, presenting German Comics and the Story of Rude Girl, with graphic artist Birgit Weyhe and German Professor Priscilla Layne, aka “Rude Girl”. 

Renewed partnerships with MIT Center for Art, Culture and Technology and Berklee College of Music led to events like the conference celebrating the 55th anniversary of the founding of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and light artist Otto Piene’s 20 year leadership thereof as well as a transatlantic discussion on Jazz and Gender Justice with jazz greats Terri Lyne Carrington, Kris Davis and Johanna Schneider with Aja Burrell Wood, managing director of Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. 

We started collaborating with RPM (Revolutions per Minute) festival, an artist run festival dedicated to experimental short films, hosting them for their annual festival screenings as well as a student-curated evening featuring the works of students in area colleges.

Our artist residency, Studio 170 ǀ Residency, featured two installations: Poly Pockets, an art installation in the form of a series of reconfigurable tent structures by artists/architects Aaron Powers and Stratton Coffman and Black Meridian by Shaka Dendy, an installation with sound and photography exploring what it means to be black. The call for 2024 brought in 55 applications from New England artists of all disciplines of which two were chosen.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of György Ligeti's birth, we presented two sold-out performances featuring highlights from Ligeti's chamber music repertoire. The Callithumpian Consort and Steve Drury performed the Horn Trio and selections from the Etudes for Piano. Choreographer and dancer Elisabeth Schilling presented her choreography to a live performance of the Etudes for Piano, once again by pianist Stephen Drury.

We also caught up with two Boston-based artists on their exciting projects in Germany recently. MIT professor and director Jay Scheib talked about his experience directing a production of Parsival at the Bayreuther Festspiele using augmented reality (AR) elements. BU professor Louis Chude-Sokei led an online conversation about his recent project “History is Listening. Re-Sonifying Nuremberg” in which he and collaborating sound artists turned the former Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally Grounds into an acoustic experiment.

We continue to offer virtual and hybrid programs on various topics, you can go back and listen to many of them:

-a conversation between two writers with Ukrainian roots talking about the war in Ukraine, Dmitrij Kapitelman speaking from Berlin and Askold Melnyczuk in Boston: 

- “The Dis/Agreement Project”: a virtual interactive Discussion with choreographer and conflict mediator Dana Caspersen and artistic collaborators, 

-“Dealing with Disenchantment: Aesthetic Enlightenment and the Art of Decolonizatiion”, a conversation on the role art can and should play in the face of rising social injustices with Thomas Mann House fellows Nikita Dhawan and Maria do Mar Castro Varela, artist Tania Bruguera and journalist Andrea Patiño Contreras. 

Thomas Mann fellow Alice Hasters talked about who can dance with Berklee Dance Professor Kurt Douglas, watch it here:  

Business  Journalist Felix Rohrbeck talked with Tufts professor Evan Horowitz who was involved in implemting the Massachusetts millionaire’s tax about “How to tax the Rich”.

Rounding out our very busy year was a dance tribute to composer Ursula Mamlok with the New Chamber Ballet, a film series celebrating the 30th anniversary of the DEFA film Library at UMass Amherst (here’s Skylar Arndt-Briggs, former Executive Director introducing The Dove on the Roof ), workshops on Improvisation and Participatory Composition  with composer Cathy Milliken at NEC and Boston Conservatory, and a screening of seven films by experimental filmmaker Marie-Pierre Bonniol (stay tuned, you’ll hear more from her in 2024).

Finally:  our Sommerkino film series, outdoor movies on five warm August nights in the Goethe backyard was a big success and is sure to return!

2022

We are back in person for events at the Goethe-Institut – but we are also continuing our online presence. Authors are still in conversation this year, and a new series started, in partnership with the Boston non-profit Now + There, focused on memorials and the role of artists in reimagining our public space. In April, we were finally able to celebrate our re-opening after renovations with the in-person premiere of ‘Dances for Goethe’, a Goethe-Institut Boston commission from 2019, featuring our wonderful partners Boston Dance Theater and Sound Icon with live music. Together with the literary magazine AGNI, we hosted our first big hybrid event, “All that we have is a Voice. Writers from Ukraine Speaking to Writers in Boston”. We had a full house and a huge online audience for this timely event on the one-month anniversary of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. Our partnership with Non-Event continued with live concerts including the Boston premiere of A-Trio. Our partner SPACE in Portland, ME presented the Goethe-Institut traveling exhibition Techno Worlds, which we augmented with a virtual panel featuring the musicians AGF (Germany) and Asha Tamirisa (USA). Piggybacking on the Berlin Philharmonic USA tour, we organized a day of school and family concerts plus round table with 20+ music education specialists in conversation with Berlin Phil music education director Katja Frei. We were able to present two Studio 170 artist duos: Heather Kapplow / Walker Tufts and Liu Wa / Yang Bao. And finally, our focus on Diversity in Music was jump-started with a hybrid symposium with two virtual conversations, a workshop/showcase with local musicians and members of Ensemble Recherche, and a concert featuring works from Ensemble Recherche’s A Postcolonial Recherche project.  

2021

2021 featured more virtual discussions and film streamings along with a few cautious yet wonderful in-person events. Studio 170 hosted two artists, Maria Finkelmeier and Shane Charles Smith, providing them with open space for experimenting, developing and presenting new works. Our Beethoven 2020 project finally got its moment: Sound Icon and Winsor Music premiered two works we commissioned from composers Heather Stebbins and Diana Rodriguez alongside Beethoven’s Septet. Movie theatres were still closed in the beginning of the year, so instead of watching Burhan Qurbani’s remake of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” on the big screen, we streamed it in the Coolidge virtual screening room and hosted an online conversation with the director. We looked at the “State of the Arts” in both Germany and the US and compared how Symphony Orchestras and Movie Theatres were faring during the pandemic. For Earth Day, we hosted our first live performance, outside in our parking lot, when Antje Duvekot performed “Anwesenheit", a commission of the Goethe-Institut Boston. More virtual conversations followed when the Boston Book Festival cancelled their in person event. We talked online with authors Ulla Lenze, Sharon Dodua Otoo and Kati Marton. Going virtual also meant commissioning Boston Dance Theatre with a dance video, “Together Apart”, which was choreographed and filmed in our beautiful space, then premiered via zoom and youtube for our online audience. And, our director Jörg Süßenbach interviewed composer Jörg Widmann online in celebration of the American premiere of his work Towards Paradise (Labyrinth VI) for trumpet and orchestra featuring Håkan Hardenberger, trumpet and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
 

2020

Instead of reopening the Goethe-Institut Boston after an extensive renovation, we went online. The pandemic forced us to develop new formats: we launched the “Authors in Conversation“ series together with the Centre for German and European Studies at Brandeis University, pairing authors from both sides of the Atlantic to discuss subjects they both worked on:  Theresia Enzensberger and Elizabeth Otto on their books about the Bauhaus. Nora Krug and Katja Petrow on personal family history, two panels on Queer Literature and more conversations followed. We talked to photographer Mark Römisch about his beautiful photographs of traces of the Bauhaus School on Cape Cod. We even ventured into an experimental live stream performance, “Escape from America (Total Recall)”. Participating in virtual projects of the Goethe-Institutes in the US, we hosted discussions on “Listening to History” (part of the regional project “Shaping the Past”) and Radical Diversity. By October we were excited to be able to present our very first Studio 170 artist residency in-person: artist Janne Höltermann a multi-media installation in the Grand Hall with an opening reception outside in our front garden.