Our Berlin language study abroad (LSA/LSA+) introduces beginner-intermediate students to the joys of staying in a buzzing Berlin and visiting other German cities. The program also helps them think through the experience of living in several languages at once. This summer, the group worked on getting comfortable with the limits of comprehension and tapped into the richness of language far beyond its verbal forms of expression
Sometimes, this meant seeing unique performances, such as SueKi Lee's Multilingualism—Where Our Worlds Touch, a dance choreographed to testimonies of daily experiences of being multilingual. On other occasions, this meant confronting stubborn family silences and what historians describe as "aphasia", or societies' refusals to address difficult historical events and periods. The students considered these in a conversation with the Black German filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain (the department's incoming Kade Visiting Professor) about her white East German family's occlusion of race and in a decolonial tour of Berlin's so-called "African quarter", where activists continue to campaign for writing the PoC histories into the urban landscape.
Sometimes, this meant learning by doing and discovering their own creative resources. On a weekend trip to Hamburg, Line Hoven, author of Liebe schaut weg, a poignant memoir about her bilingual family's miscommunications and silences, and one of only six scratch artists in Europe, let the group take over her studio and shop (Atelier Fritzen) for a scratch art workshop that made everyone lose track of time.
In Berlin, Nis Søgaard, Professor for Contemporary Puppetry at the Ernst Busch Academy for Performing Arts, gave the group a hilarious and very hands-on demonstration of its mask and puppet collection. It was a little spooky and extremely liberating to speak and move as one fuzzy monster or another. Not only that: as Naniko Kakonashvili'27 observed, it gave the students a taste of how diverse and surprising the world of creative professions really is.
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Is it a Frankenstein? Wesley Icken'26, Naniko Kanonashvili'27, and Berre Kahraman'25 help Professor for Contemporary Puppetry Nis Søgaard find out
Are you curious about participating? Talk to us about the LSA and LSA+! The next application cycle finishes in late January/early February 2025.