Berlin University of the Arts

Based in New York and Berlin, Elvia Wilk has published her writings in Freeze, Art Forum, Metropolis, Moose, Flash Art, and Art in America, among others, and is currently a contributing editor at Eflux Journal and finishing a master's degree at the New School for Social Research.

She has taught at the University of the Arts Berlin, Eugene Lang College, and City College of New York.

And she's here today to talk about her debut novel out from Soft Skull Press entitled Oval.

Kirkus and its starred review calls Oval deeply weird and unsettlingly hilarious.

He studied philosophy, literature, and theology in Germany, immersing himself in the European intellectual tradition that would become the raw material of his thought.

Eventually, after years of study and writing, he became a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, a position that placed him at the intersection of philosophy and aesthetics, of thinking and making, of ideas and the world of creative work.

It was an apt home for a thinker whose concerns would increasingly center on questions of attention, perception, beauty, and the quality of experience in a world that seemed intent on flattening everything into data and productivity.

From this perch in Berlin, he began producing the steady stream of short, incisive books that would make his name.

He is, by all accounts, trying to live the alternative he describes, to carve out a space of contemplative quiet in a world that militates against it.

Whether this makes him a model or merely a privileged exception is a question his critics are quick to raise, and it is a fair one.

The freedom to tend a garden and write short books at the Berlin University of the Arts is not available to everyone.

But the diagnosis he offers is aimed not at individuals but at a social form, and the question of whether that form can be resisted is a different question from whether any particular individual has managed to do so.

Her work has also appeared in publications including Self Service and System Magazine.

Alongside journalism, she has taught at several American universities including Yale and is today professor of design theory at Berlin's University of Arts.

What I find particularly fascinating about Ingeborg is the way she looks at fashion.

She connects clothing to architecture, art, history, materials, sensuality, consumer culture and ultimately society.

And so it's really an international teachers and it's really high professional program, I think.

I mean, it's a great university to the ones which I don't know, the University of Arts, the UDK Berlin.

I have been also really... happy to teaching there for many years.

I had great students.

If you want to give somebody who has to decide something in this world, in this country, a very concrete idea of something which is possible to really do, not something where we think we wish and it's never possible to put it into place.

What would it be combined or in the area combined with storytelling? So, for example, what place should it have in further education, in education, in raising? I

think storytelling Storytelling has to be a fixed institution from little childhood on to university.

So this really moment, one woman per week of storytelling and of being together and listen and share stories.