Heike Fiedler is a quintessential poet of lila, a wordsmith of play. Her work is a continuation and combination of visual poetry and sound poetry, which leads her texts to become an intermedial lecture, a middle path of profound engagement. Towards this, she uses contemporary tools, often those used by Video and Disk Jockeys. She projects and mixes her voice and words or letter-fragments in a realtime-process, instead of simply playing an instrument such as guitar to form a background for poetry reading.
Heike’s poetry combines different languages within a single text, switching from word to word, even from syllable to syllable. Besides considering language as sound material, her approach interrogates the status of language in the manner of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Hence, her poetry aims for equality, peaceful cohabitation, respect, and inclusiveness. She raises her voice for the equality of rights for women and men, regardless of her or his religion, sexual orientation, origins and language – equality as experience and not just a mention on paper.
Even her living situation is reflective of this philosophy. Heike lives in a cooperative housing space, where the inhabitants are co-responsible for everything. While securing them from the vagaries and insecurities of the housing market, this also implies the involvement of members in all activities, which offers, especially to the children that have grown up here, a philosophy of sharing, respect and liberty. For Heike, it gives her a place where she can live, work and act.
In the video above, all residents participate in the inauguration of a poem Heike Fiedler installed on both sides of each wooden shutter. All closed shutters had been opened according to a pre-determined fraction of time, which we see here in acceleration. This is her third installation in public space, which figures in the official Geneva Contemporary Art Cultural Trail.
