Sophia Barthelmes - ein reim & Alexander Rudolfi - Willkommen im Bauch der Maschine

‘ein reim’ (a rhyme) by Sophia Barthelmes (2025) examines the property of rhyme in small linguistic units, words, morphemes, letters and their fractions: pairs that are both similar and dissimilar; and de- and recomposes connections, memory, identity(ies) with these linguistic units or pairs. Does child rhyme with mother? What is a pair?

The author reads from her long poem. Voice and performance artist Alexey Kokhanov, who has written compositions for some units of the long poem, takes up individual words, letters, lines and pairs of lines tonally with score, improvisation and composition. The text is made visually accessible as surtitles.

The plane taxis, takes off and accelerates for departure, but the narrator's thoughts in Alexander Rudolfi's debut novel ‘Welcome to the Belly of the Machine (2025)’ push back. Back to the Italian island where he read Gramsci's prison notebooks, observed current political events, met S. and took trips with her to villages notorious for their resilience, strongly attached to their traditions and rendered partially uninhabitable by heavy metal mining. This brings him to the rugged coastline of his consciousness, where times and words merge, and he increasingly asks himself when he lost control: was it when he sat down in the machine and surrendered himself to the hands of an invisible pilot? Or was it before that?

In a dense structure between lyrical reflection and prosaic experience, Welcome to the Belly of the Machine tells an intoxicating and dazzling tale of paranoid life in a technocratic reality – and of the attempt to find a way out.

Sophia Barthelmes directs and writes. She studied cultural studies and literature, modern German literature, theatre directing and dramatic writing. She works transdisciplinarily in the field of language in the performing, visual and sound arts. In 2025, she will receive the City of Graz Literature Promotion Award and is nominated for the Retzhofer Drama Prize. ‘ein reim’ is her first book publication.

Alexey Kokhanov is a vocalist and sound artist in Berlin who works at the intersection of new music and sound performance. In his artistic practice, he explores aspects of the voice – physiological, psychological, aesthetic and political. In 2025, he completed a master's degree in spatial strategies at the Berlin-Weißensee Academy of Art.

Alexander Rudolfi, born in Freyung in 1987, studied social work, philosophy and literary writing in Munich, Hildesheim and Sassari. In 2022, he was the winner of the open mike competition. His work has been supported by, among others, a working scholarship from the State of Lower Saxony, a scholarship from the Minerva Kolleg and a residency scholarship from the Künstlerhäuser Worpswede. His texts have appeared in various magazines (manuskripte, Transistor, die horen, etc.). In 2022, his book hyperlinklabyrinthe was published.