Heike Fiedler

Heike Fiedler

Author, poet, performer, works with sound and image installations among other things. She performs her texts with a laptop, paper, module, real-time electronics, and pencils. She has taken part in international literature and poetry festivals, readings, and music festivals since 2000. She runs workshops in creative writing and performance writing. She took part in the research project titled "Public Appearances by Authors. Self-image and Stagecraft" organized by Bern University of the Arts (BUA) and the Swiss Literature Institute (SLI), 2010-2012. She has collaborated with musicians from the fields of improvisation and electroacoustics. She has devised and implemented a number of multidisciplinary projects (La Bätie-Festival de Genève, Poésie en arrosoir festival). She has published numerous articles in periodicals, anthologies, and CDs. There have also been several periods as writer in residence (Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation, L'Arc Romainmétier, Pro Helvetia-New Delhi). She has received several grants from the city and the canton of Geneva for her text-based spatial projects, as well as support from Pro Helvetia.

Supervisors

Prof. Dr. Patrick Suter, Universität Bern, Institut de Langue et de Littérature françaises, Section de littérature
Dr. Arno Renken, Hochschule der Künste Bern HKB, Organisationseinheit: Forschung, Y Institut, Schweizerisches Literaturinstitut

Doctoral project

performance writing - der Text als künstlerische Strategie

The research project titled "Performance Writing – the Text As Artistic Strategy" investigates the status of the text in various performance situations (orality, digital poetry, performance art). Rather than performance being about declaiming the text, it is more a case of the text being one of the strategies used to deliver the performance. The interplay of various strategies, as well as the appearance of the text in materialities other than a book (imagery, sound), produces the kind of trans- or intermedial field of interaction in which the concept of performance writing becomes relevant. It is not just a case of the text used having been or being written; the performance continually rewrites itself too, so to speak, at the moment of its delivery. The project has both a theoretical and a practical angle insofar as it sheds some light on literary practice and provides an irrevocable link between literature and the performative practices of contemporary art. Any remaining skeptics would do well to consider John Cage and everything he has done to enrich the performance of music.

• Heike Fiedler: La poésie en performance [Poetry As Performance], Philology-Foreign Languages and Literatures Series, year XVIII, Issue 18, 2013, pages 271-279.
• Heike Fiedler: Die Metamorphosen der Lyrik im Feld der Interdiziplinarität – ein Essay [Metamorphoses of Lyric Poetry in the Field of Interdisciplinarity – an Essay], Bozzetto No5, Zürich, 2013.

Research priorities

Orality, digital poetry, art performance, performance