A Charm of Powerful Trouble: Expanded Programme

»You won't believe what I’m about to tell you…«

As you enter the realm of soft murmurs, powerful trouble begins to unfold. Here, illicit knowledge travels between lips. Morphed by each tongue, it becomes something that holds us together. A fragile chain, passed on and created by hidden and collective effort.

»Shhh…

This gossip can save you.«

Brushed aside, written off as trivial, feminine, and unprofessional, gossip has always been a vital mode of transmitting knowledge, signalling danger and building solidarity. Sharing what cannot be spoken aloud, forming alliances and finding resources to counter dominant structures. Our whispers relentlessly disrupt what appears fixed.

»I’m not allowed to tell you this but…«

We drift on the borderline of what is embraced and what is denied. Spreading myths around this city. Watch precious rumours circulate. As a source of social bonding and empowerment, gossip has long been a vital resource for groups with limited or no access to the public sphere. Hidden talk maintains community, creating alternative cultures and tools of resistance.

»So I keep whispering…«

Curated by Colette Patterson

Text: Emma Schunack

✦ 10 September, 5pm Spill the Tea: Printed Matter & Readings with:

Encapsulated in printed matters you will find visual codes, gossip, subcultures, and soft powers. Explore unfiltered content in zines, artists’ books to independent magazines. Perhaps share your own or get inspired to make your own. Come on down to Lady Liberty Library on Library Street to ›spill the tea‹—reveal some juicy secrets—on the hottest new publications fresh from Indiecon 2026. 

We can build this thing together—a call and answer poem for two ›Ma-AAh means come here in cat language‹ We can build this thing together is a conversation that grew from a mutual language of references. Through shared notes and long distance friendship Florian Emden wrote a  fragmented poem, a love letter—their  favourite medium to each other, to friendship, and to voices read and borrowed. Conceived as a large billboard, the work is turned into a performative reading this the occasion of Berlin Art Week, lending sounds to voices coming from the paratext.

✦ 11 September, 6pm Evening of Intervention with:

TLC23 (Katie Shannon/Keira Fox/Vera Karlson) present a second edition of Shitbrickhouseberlintlc23090026. A collective work around support systems within precarity and instability, a reactionary procedure of activating space within a constant conflicting frequency (shattered undercurrent) tape mix and sound bank with live spoken text, processed, percussive interventions and an industrial temporal backdrop (steel installation and accessories). Action degrades into a continuous drudge of melancholy role play.

HellFun presents Svidd Hale presents HellFun extra extended Buskspel A decade ago HellFun made a public film shoot performance together with a bunch of artists and friends on walpurgis night, ending in a Midnight Delivery Chainsaw Abortion Action and a collective singing of Everybody Hurts. Svidd Hale joins in using the end of HellFun as the start of a live jam session performance. Bogdanov on a video call from Paris. A Sámi coffee ritual. A song about a watered out, from skin and bones freed herring. Three accordions and a lute meet in a motley bellow slope of distorted folk songs sliding into improvisations, letting the instruments hear each other.

✦ 13 September, 5pm Venus in Three Movements: Gossip with Tabloid Press featuring Soria Reilly, Adam Sinclaire and Nadia Marcus

Gossip activates eclectic and informal communication forms—whispering, confession, irony, and mythopoetics—as methodologies of resistance against structural oppression. Fragment to fragment to rebellion, gossip becomes a political tool. Zack Darsee and Nadia Marcus curate a programme of live readings, performance and sound. Buttressing each instalment and utilising various spaces of the ACUD complex, these poets, musicians and performers draw focus to the relational and ephemeral, the sonic and blushingly sensual charge TABLOID’s events fill a room with.  

The project Venus in Three Movements works with the archive as inseparable from the play of power that produced it—foregrounding absence, incompleteness, and opacity as critical and generative forces. Each movement expands into printed matter and is broadcast on Refuge Worldwide.

Bios: 

TLC23 is the collaborative platform initiated by Artists Katie Shannon and  Keira Fox ,they explore themes around collective trauma, mania, panic and unravelling personas, within a distinctly feminist impulse. The collective is rooted in experimental music of the darker ilk, which often plays an integral part of TLC23 happenings and offerings. The project exists at the intersection of music, visual art, and performance, creating curated spaces, collaborating with other artists, musicians and makers, within blurred line environments and often specific to their locations.

Svidd Hale (burnt tail) is a musical project, an accordion trio, a band and more. Three accordions, vocals and a lute meet in a motley bellow slope of distorted folk songs sliding into improvisations, letting the instruments hear each other. What do these detuned drone scapes reveal about instrument ontologies and personal relationships, drives and desires?

Josefin Arnell and Max Göran met and started working together under the name HellFun in 2014, since then they have made sporadic video and performance works under the motto “brave and pathetic is better than drowning in shame.” 

Tabloid Press poetics are embodied disclosures, versed environments, tall orders. They are poets talking and playing with talking. Conceived in Berlin in 2014 by Zack Darsee and Nadia Marcus, the project’s first publication was a gossip column on newsprint—the effect of its lyrics were intended not only for the private reader, but for the whole interpersonal terrain in and about which they wrote. Beyond its primary imprint as a poetry press, TABLOID upholds its role as a publisher expansively. As an instrument for ›making public.‹ Activities in the years since its founding have included facilitating poetry workshops, designing posters and clothing, and hosting a regular radio broadcast. No matter the format or function, the press’ activities are always means of innervating the body, be it collective or individual, with the lyric.

Soria Reilly is an Irish artist and musician based in Berlin.  Her music blends electronic instrumentation, drone, found audio and voice with a potent sensuality and emotive power. She has performed at venues across Ireland, the UK and Europe including Dublin’s National Concert Hall, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, St Peter’s Seminary and Cosmos Campolide.

Adam Sinclaire is a flautist based in Berlin. After receiving an ATCL performance diploma from Trinity College London, he went on to study BA Music at the University of Leeds with a focus on electroacoustic composition and music theory. Adam has since expanded his practice to include a wide range of extended techniques, exploring the sonic and performative limits of the C flute. He’s recently performed in works commissioned by institutions including KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin Atonal, Martin-Gropius-Bau, and Schinkel Pavillon, and continues to work as a session musician and performer with composers and artists across the contemporary music spectrum.

Nadia Marcus (*1993, New York City) is a poet, designer, DJ and co-editor of Tabloid Press, a publishing house and media imprint founded with Zack Darsee. Marcus has given poetry readings and performances in venues such as KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, DE), Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (Berlin, DE), Haus am Waldsee (Berlin, DE), and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen, DK). She broadcasts sets regularly at the Berlin-based radio station Refuge Worldwide, and is a resident DJ of the event series subglow.

Lady Liberty Library is a resource center for independent publishing, focusing on art, community, and education. The library understands itself as an event. Via our exhibitions, events, festivals, reading groups, the library is activated by its readers, publishers, artists, and librarians. In our publishing showcases and programs: publishing is an art form. We aim to highlight queer-feminist perspectives, diaspora, and care, locating in Berlin, Vienna, and nomadic pop-ups on tour. 

Florian ∞ Emden is an artist duo sharing a collaborative writing practice. Sophie Florian and Hanako Emden teach and design together. Their practice is based around moments of joy and collaboration. They currently live, love, work, and laugh in Berlin and Leipzig.