A performative activation of the space by and with Juliana Oliveira
Reading and conversation with Jessica J. Lee

Wieder gut
A performative activation of the space by and with Juliana Oliveira

Juliana Oliveira has been chopping wood since 2017, exploring various forms of expression of this male-connoted physicality. She calls her ongoing performative research AXT. Oliveira’s interest is primarily focussed on the powerful, spectacular and virtuoso aspects of this gesture. In her performance Wieder gut she emphasises the gentle, intimate and careful relationship with the wood that develops with the chopping. In a first performative attempt, she reassembles the three-metre-long trunk of a pine tree that she brought back from Portugal after cutting it up herself with a chainsaw, splitting hammer, wedges and axes.

Portuguese artist Juliana Oliveira works as a freelance performer and theatre maker. She develops interdisciplinary, conceptual performances focusing on physicality, in which her fascination with the brutal and absurd finds expression. In the silent concerts of her fake rock band FrontMan (2019), she explored bandleaders. Her last full-length work was BEST OF: BAUM. She is currently in the middle of research for the project MIT PFLANZEN TANZEN and is teaching herself vehicle mechanics. As a performer, she can be seen in productions by Nora Elberfeld, Frauen und Fiktion, &Sistig, Greta Granderath, Reut Shemesh and Antje Pfundtner, among others. She regularly broadcasts PLATEAU with Heike Bröckerhoff on Radio FSK.

Text and voice by Greta Granderath.

DISPERALS. On Plants, Borders, and Belonging
Reading by Jessica J. Lee, followed by a discussion with Juliana Oliveira and Jessica J. Lee

A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A seaweed drifts through an ocean. A tree is planted on a shifting border. A shrub is uprooted from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?

Jessica J. Lee’s poetic essay collection explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds, and detects the echoes and counterpoints in the migration of plants and people – and the language we use to describe them. Each of the plants considered here are somehow perceived as being „out of place“ – whether weeds, samples collected through imperial science, or crops introduced by our hand.

Combining memoir, history, and scientific research, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong – or not – as they cross borders.

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian. She is the author of prizewinning books of nature writing, Turning (2017), Two Trees Make a Forest (2020) and Dispersals. On Plants Borders and Belonging (2024), the children’s book A Garden Called Home (2024), and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted (2023). She was Writer-in-Residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin from 2017–2018. Jessica is the founding editor of the digital platform The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada. She lives in Berlin.