Laura Staab

Niki de Saint Phalle hated laundry. When she was twelve years old, there was a decisive moment in the linen closet with her mother. ‘She was counting out the sheets and the towels,’ the artist later recalled. ‘I will never do that, I told her… Never will I spend time doing anything like that.’Niki de Saint Phalle, ‘Feminism’ [undated] in Nicole Rudick, What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography by Niki de Saint Phalle (New York: Siglio Press, 2022), 128.

That we can be here…and still find things to call beautiful and to love or to be unable to stop loving is indefensible. But we are here, and we do. —Anahid Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse Oceanic waters are “drenched in sperm and tears” as “Sea Foam”—one of 27 pensive, playful texts in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leuco (1947)—begins. How boring, remarks Sappho to a nearby nymph.

Speaking at the press conference to inaugurate the 74th Berlinale, actor and competition jury president Lupita Nyong'o said that she had heard one remark repeated since she had arrived in the German capital: “how political the Berlinale is.” She was not alone in being “curious to learn what that meant.” When we expect the Berlinale to be political, what indeed do we expect?