deBuren

citybooks is a new project by deBuren. Five authors, a photographer and a video artist take up residence and make a unique city portrait, including City One Minutes, photographs and citybooks. The central focus of a citybook (ten pages of prose or poetry) is the visited city. The South-African author/dramaturge Brink Scholtz is the first writer residing in Utrecht. She meets one of the most prominent South-African poets: Breyten Breytenbach – a man whom she gave a flower as an eight-year-old. Translator and poet Krijn Peter Hesselink concludes the evening by discussing social commitment in a rapidly changing world with Breytenbach and Scholtz.

Breytenbach’s essay collection Berichten uit de Middenwereld (Messages from the Middle world) – the third part of four in a series called The Middle World Quartet – appears in April. In this essay, Breytenbach confronts his readers with a world of globalising capitalism and unequal power relations between north and south. But he also sketches a self-imagined utopian ‘Middle World’ where ‘inhabitants’ like Einstein, the Dalai Lama, Pessoa, Jimmy Hendrix and Vincent van Gogh reside. In his new book, Breytenbach writes an open letter to Nelson Mandela, in which he criticises the wrongs in present-day South-Africa. But he also extends the line of history from the icon Mandela to Obama as a contemporary embodiment of hope and change.

Breyten Breytenbach (1939°) moved to Paris in 1962. During a visit to his homeland in 1975, he was arrested on the charge of ‘political terrorism’. He wrote a novel De ware bekentenissen van een witte terrorist (1984) (The true confessions of a white terrorist) about the seven years of his imprisonment. Breytenbach lives in different places in Europe, Africa and the United States.

Brink Scholtz studied drama and psychology on the Rhodes University in Grahamstown and worked subsequently for three years in Scotland. Since 2006, she works as a resident director for the theatre company Ubom! in Grahamstown. Scholtz is a laureate of the Rhodes University and received the Amnesty International Award for social change through performing Arts.

deBuren in collaboration with Stichting Vrede van Utrecht and Stichting Liteaire Activiteiten Utrecht