Teenage Dreams and Political Nightmares: An Interview with Charlie Jeffries
Ki Niehaus of COVEN Berlin interviews historian Charlie Jeffries about her 2022 book “Teenage Dreams: Girlhood Sexualities in the U.S. Culture Wars”.
Read MoreKi Niehaus of COVEN Berlin interviews historian Charlie Jeffries about her 2022 book “Teenage Dreams: Girlhood Sexualities in the U.S. Culture Wars”.
Read MoreIn July 2023, COVEN and DoLess, an international well-being and resilience artistic collective, organized and produced a week-long explorative artistic research laboratory and residence. DoLess art collective has evolved from a series of creative workshops aimed at Belarusians during 2020-2023. They have held over 70 events with a total of 1700 participants.
Read MoreLaia Abril’s On Rape – And Institutional Failure is a small exhibition packed with written information, occupying the front three rooms of the upstairs gallery space at C/O Berlin.
Read MoreWe kiss and slowly undress, as we impatiently caress and taste each other’s bodies like two starved pilgrims at the end of their long walking day. We are both sweating a lot. Our bodies are hot with desire. I feel like a scallop floating in the ocean, soaked in the holy water of desire and touch.
Read MoreThe feeling that stayed with me after finishing Kleinstadtnovelle was not that puberty itself is the problem, but the hostile conditions in which it is supposed to happen.
Read MoreLong-beloved by COVEN BERLIN since we began, artist and performer Melanie Jame Wolf opened her largest solo exhibition to date last October titled The Creep, curated by Adriana Tranca at E-WERK…
Read MoreIt was in 2020 when D’orjay, debuting Shit My Shaman Says: Volume I, a work Axe Pulse agnate in its anti-linear subversiveness, first came upon my newsfeed.
Read MoreCOVEN hosted this beautiful reading in the summer of 2022 on the beach with authors Zinzi Buchanan, Inky Lee, Daniela Medina Poch, and Meghna Singh. We selected their articles as…
Read MoreEmotional as in congratulations, mental illness runs in the family. Also, coronary heart disease.
Read MoreWhen considering having a threesome, there are five very important questions you should ask yourself to have the hottest and most fun experience possible for all parties involved.
Read MoreIn the first episode of The Lonely Island (2001), Ardy, played by twenty-three year old Andy Samberg, all lips and shaggy curls, stars in a goofy early-90’s-hip-hop-MTV-style interlude. From the twin-sized bottom bunk on my ten-centimeter iPod screen, I studied this scene with adolescent gravitas.
Read Morei see trees falling as they cannot ground/roots can’t hold onto anything /that would give them stability
Read MoreAs part of the large group exhibition titled How (Not) to Fit In – Metaphern der Adoleszenz at Villa Merkel, Galerie der Stadt Esslingen, in Esslingen, Germany, which ran from May 8 – July 17, 2022, COVEN BERLIN created the installation and environment we called AXE PULSE, eponymously named after our current magazine and curatorial theme (which can be read here).
Read MoreThe internet in the 2010’s was a very special time and place to come of age as a trans woman. It was right at the end of old systems of categorization and identification, as well as the old internet.
Read MoreGabriela Gordillo is an artist, born in Mexico City and living and working since 2015 in Linz, Austria. In this piece, she reflects on the work that her father has undertaken for many years, since her adolescence — taking photographs of the moon — and juxtaposes it with her thoughts about Minute/Year, a durational sound-based installation artwork by Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty.
Read Morewith: Zinzi Buchanan, COVEN BERLIN, Inky Lee, Daniela Medina Poch, and Meghna Singh
NEW DATE: Sunday 4th of September at 6:00 pm (we will be there swimming at the beach from 4pm on! If you want to join, bring 3 euros and a towel 🙂
Address: Strandbad Tegelsee /Zentrum für Kultur und Erholung Schwarzer Weg 95, 13505 Berlin
Hosted by: Neue Nachbarschaft Moabit and Moabit Mountain College
Begun in 2021, Wart Paintings is an ongoing series that is part of an ever-growing body of warts Johanna Hedva has been cultivating for years. Mysterious, recalcitrant, and oddly sentient, warts testify to an animist reality, antagonizing our belief in individual agency by forcing us to negotiate with and relate emotionally to an inanimate foreign body embedded in our own. An old wives’ tale states that warts will leave the body if you simply ask them to, as if they are listening. There is a relationship there—what is it?
Read MoreI turned the laundry hamper upside down, shaking the quivering body into the planter. A rat, fugitive found in the bathroom of my shared flat, tumbled into the mess of cigarette butts and weeds growing near the trunk of the tree that separated the sidewalk from the parked cars. I’m sorry, I thought, following the rat’s ecstasy as she fled to the faintly fissured gray bark. I couldn’t find a wild place to bring you. A siren howled, blue and white light lit up the underside of the branches that graced the first floor of the apartment building where I took shelter.
Read MoreAdolescence is nothing if not an endless series of paradoxes. As a teenager you spend your days with packs of people, and yet often feel utterly isolated. You’re carving your own identity, yet are indelibly shaped by the influences around you. It’s excruciating, and magical, and formative, with highs and lows that are as devastating as they are delirious.
Read MoreThe first time I stepped into marsh water was when I was about 7. One of the first sunny days in early May. My friend’s family took me along with them to the reservoir. We were all neighbors living in the same street on the outskirts, and in the summer all the kids were biking there quite often. But at that time we probably were yet too young to go there by ourselves.
Read MoreIn my project “The Art of (Not) Forgetting”, which began in February 2021, around 4 months after the start of the protests in Belarus, I tried to use storytelling and photography as a means of opposing the regime of the last European dictator: Alexander Lukashenko. The idea that brought me to address these issues was prompted by the situation I was observing in my country since August 2020. During massive rallies against the rigged presidential election, one of the symbols used by the opposition was the white-red-white flag that refers to the period of an independent Belarus and dates back to 1918. Very soon the regime declared this combination was “extremist” and eventually banned. People wearing clothes, scarves, bracelets, and even socks with the “wrong” colors were detained, fined, and given prison sentences.
Read MoreHuman culture, people’s beliefs and behaviors are shaped by the natural environment we live in. Climate defines our diets and clothing habits, but certainly the most intricate interactions occur at deeper levels – deserts or jungles, the closeness to big waters or high mountains determine the way we perceive ourselves and others and feel about this strange thing called “life”.
Read MoreI’ve spent a lot of the last years in bogland – literal and metaphysical. For six years I obsessively returned to a river in Lancashire, (U.K.). I spent most of my time on top of the peat fells (big swathes of high altitude, boggy moorland with flat tops), looking for the source of small rivers that swell out of the wetland and spill down the cracks they make in the hillsides.
Read MoreAudio transcription: Pluto is the deity of the underworld, the planet of raw power, obsession and control, organized violence, reversals, and foundational transformations. In astrology, the Pluto return is the…
Read MoreDay to day, I write and organize projects about the digital commons — where groups of people with aligned goals build systems of digital communication and information that they rely on and steward together. Like a community garden, but we dig our hands into signals, scatter bits and pixels so they grow into something meaningful. Platform co-operatives, community networks, digital research and cultural archives, Free and Open Source projects, are just some examples.
Read More05.03.22 at feldfünf with Mary Maggic and Johanna Hedva //06.03.22 online with Alice Sparklykat and Mai Ishikawa Sutton // We’re witnessing a revival in occultism and esoteric practices, at least…
Read MoreTo hear some beats to relax/study to,
I invoke Lofi girl.In a mythic time of human/cyborg symbiosis, she and I are one. By the grace of her beats, I can achieve my best self.
The scene is all too familiar, the gestures rehearsed. It begins with the innocence of casual browsing, the wide-eyed wonder as you click and scroll, traipsing around some mildly interesting news article. Then it leers at you, inevitable and horrible.
Read More‘A Conversation on Care’ was the official name of the talk SchwarzRund and I gave in Summer 2021, as part of COVEN BERLIN’s event “an invitation to sink in to the bog.” Watching it back though, I realise that another title could have been ‘A long overdue catch up between friends who are always keen to work together, could forever talk to each other, but don’t always have the energy to do so.’
Read MoreNot so long ago I met a troll for the first time. Or I think I did. I’ve probably met others, but since they usually work in the shadows, their identity is anonymous. Trolls never show they are trolls. But this time we were living together.
Read MoreDOOM leaves space for not just the work, but also specifically the footwork of mourning to pop up, which at times might look like a teetering dance and heavy breath from under a lace mask.
Read MoreMoisture fills all pores. When the whole planet is immersed in tropical weather, there will be no infertile soil and diversity will flourish in every corner.
Read MorePoems by Inky Lee.
I knew of an asian man. His body was small and he was going blind. He quit his office job and was training to become a masseur – to see with his hands while his eyes cease to see. He was a devout christian and was known to pray for many hours every day. People called him a holy man. One time, I went to his place to get a massage. After the massage, he prayed for me. As I was about to leave, he smirked and told me to never bring a black man home because that would make my mother go into a long fast.
Read MoreComing from Bogotá, a previous swamp which was dried out in colonial times, I didn’t grow up with a body of water close to me. The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans were around 10 and 13 hours away from where I lived.
Read MoreNovember 19-21 2021
at feldfünf e.V.
Fromet-und-Moses-Mendelssohn-Platz 7-8
10969 Berlin
and online
A few nights in a friend’s apartment, a Zoom support group, a Telegram chat that share free hormones: these are the bogs of queer commons some of us rely on. In an upside down hyper-capitalist world, COVEN BERLIN welcomes you to bogside down part 1: a weekend of discussion and workshops looking at the alternative structures that support us when the outside world can’t or refuses to.
Read MoreI am a farmer. An Icelandic male farmer. (It is sometime in the Olden Times.) I live in a traditional Icelandic turf house.
Read MoreI sit here- writing this while the sound checks for a festival in Victoria Park sound out. It is like 1, 2, 3- 3 ch’ ch’. I sit here writing this while my childhood best friend is preparing to play at this festival- I will be able to hear him from my window.
Read MoreThis is the story of my arrival to Berlin.
1. The setting. (Separation) t is spring 2019, and I have just moved to Berlin. I am filled with excitement and curiosity to rediscover the city I was born in, but that I haven’t lived in since I was a toddler. I am still able to romanticise the U-bahn and the fact that I sleep in a bare room on a shitty mattress. It suits the coming of age narrative I created in my head. The 30 days I spent here so far have been full of encounters and activities, as if I made it my goal to explore each facet of the city as fast as possible.
Read MoreHave you ever walked into a room on a warm evening and noticed an unpleasant odor? So unpleasant and complicated that it is visible to the naked eye?
I haven’t smoked for two months, yet I wake up every day with an acid taste in my mouth. The bitterness that I reflect to others mirrors the bitterness within me. It’s a bitterness so rich with associations, so raw and complicated.
Read MoreAudio transcription: Last year, for the first time in my life, I entertained the thought of having a child, and even becoming pregnant. During a…
Read MoreAs part of Writing Letters to Extraterrestrials Organized by Alison Sperling 22.-24.09.2021 COVEN BERLIN will also give a talk on 24.09.21 at ICI Berlin
22. September, 17h-18:30 Starting Location: Fromet-und-Moses-Mendelssohn-Platz 10969 Berlin
Read MoreI am writing this days after the Ahr river flooded in the west of Germany, killing 184 people.* The pictures, a friend says, look photoshopped, as they show me how to move the cursor from right to left, displaying the before and after scenes. All I can think is ‘less green.’ The same friend tells me of the flooding of the Elbe river that happened in 2002, and that it was Eurocentrically named “the flood of the century” (Jahrhundert Flut). After all, most floods of this century have not covered European soil. The broken banks are presented as a governmental failure to predict, re-inforce, and secure. Control measures failed and Germany’s immunity to climate disaster has been torn a little, despite the appearance of success. The holy see it as a message from God, the capitalists call it a time for harder intervention and more capable management, and time travellers say, as with every so-called year, this is the year of the bog.
Read MoreYou can be hammering nails into a wall without a care in the world, thinking how nice this Mona Lisa print is going to look just here above the sofa, how it’s going to catch the light very nicely indeed and – SNAP!
Read MoreDeadline: MAY 1ST!!!
We want your dankest, most pungent, strangest, saddest, gayest, feuchtest, softest memes as subject matter for one or both of these extremely online events:
Read MoreBhajan’s sexual and emotional abuse does not stand alone, but is linked to a much larger system of abuse of power. And this system pervaded all areas of his personality, including his teachings.
Read MoreFor two hot afternoons in the summer of 2020, COVEN BERLIN hosted a paranormal and deeply personal walking tour at the invitation of Feldfünf e.V. for their show Flaneurin* oder…
Read MoreDuring a time that transmuted touch into a mere theoretical, that differentially and differently affected the people around me, I felt an impulse to gather together—an attempt at a grand, unified theory of the sensory, particularly of touch.
Read MoreThere has become a market, driven by social media aesthetics, for the radical slogan, a marketing for leftist politics, and therefore, a market for continued oppression. Though graphics elevate and increase the share-ability of messaging, this practice has translated into consumer goods with trendy, relevant, and co-optive messaging.
Read MoreA new poem by Samantha Bohatsch.
Read MoreWhile the five stages of grief can be a useful tool for understanding your emotions after loss, the five stages of heat is a useful companion BEFORE making a big change, because it can help you understand why you feel equal parts hot and bothered.
Read MoreSophie Lewis reviews Clay AD’s debut novel, Metabolize, If Able.
Read MoreI never felt the impact of ideas and theories expressed about music. I feel that they are a kind of intellectual punishment to music for being so accessible in an epidermal, sensory way.
Read MoreIs it legally possible to get fined in hindsight for having attended a party during the Covid lockdown? If so, the following story is fiction, set in August 2020. A potential superspreader event – except no one got sick.
Read MoreApparently it could happen any day now. I’m not sure what to feel. Excitement? Sure, but for what? For the one heat I will ever have, which probably will not result in sex?
Read MoreI’m 33 but my face is 2 years old. No, I haven’t had a face-swap surgery like in that Nic Cage movie. I’m just a trans guy enjoying the magical touch of Testosterone.
Read MoreWith long talons on feet and fingers and scruffy thick hair, we move slowly. Fluidly, awkwardly, heavily. We survive a heatwave, extremities doubling and then tripling in size, itching and prickling, I run them under cool water for relief.
Read MoreThe following selection of poems was written between March and June 2020, kindled by my personal experience with unwanted gestation during quarantine.
Read MoreI used to live for summer. The other seasons formed one long purgatory to be endured in anticipation of the moment when I could finally flourish under the blazing sun of foreign lands.
Read MoreWarming up for the Unknown is a warm up Xercise manual to prepare for unknown and indeterminate outcomes. Engaging non-linear process, every warm up proposes a series of steps that don’t share what one is warming up for.
Read MoreSex scares me because it requires me to trust that someone can treat me with respect, despite the ways society has robbed me of my self-regard.
Read MoreA/B/O verse is a parody of the white, nuclear family. In A/B/O verse, the world is made up of alphas, betas, and omegas. In addition to your primary gender…
Read MoreSacha Vega is an American artist creating at the intersection of photography, installation art, and writing, based in the Greater New York area. Through her practice, she “advises the viewer…
Read MoreIt’s 3.34 am. I’m stripped down to my boxers writing this. My apartment is sweltering. Berlin is currently in the sweaty throes of a “heatwave.”
Read MoreI’m laying down in a fetal position, knocked out by pain. Saliva drips from my mouth and I’m on the verge of passing out. I’ve taken a mix of random painkillers and they’re finally hitting. The pain stops; I have a mini orgasm.
Read MoreDuring the Corona time, I have been hearing the word “Normalität” almost daily in the news: the eagerness to return to “normality.” The following poem is a small glimpse of my normality.
Read MoreThis is a choose-your-own-adventure and how-to guide on sharing and saving money. It is intended to help you figure out whether you can afford to share money, and to encourage you to save money.
Read MoreOctober 27, 2024 Recently I had the chance to sit down with COVEN friend Yeşim Duman to have a coffee in the sunlight to talk about the current iteration of…
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