LIDILE Lundi - 10 novembre 2025 - Prof Anne Storch

In this talk, I offer insights into ways of storytelling that allow us to draw a connection between the porosity of third landscapes (in the sense of Gilles Clément) and the contingency in linguistic hospitality. I intend to show that what matters in such ways of storytelling is not contributing to the construction of boundaries (and foreigners, ownership, traditions and so forth) within an order that continues to produce mainly wastelands, but rather co-creating practices and ways of thinking that instead can direct our gaze toward the liminality of places and focus on what is of utmost importance in language and social practice: the vague, and the almost fluid space in-between, where the living and the dead meet. Storytelling as a form of finding modes of living together without taking possession of the land, world, or even language is thus also conceived as a process that is highly dangerous for nation states and imperial, neocolonial projects. What is proposed here, with the help of metaphors that we have learned to find beautiful but not dangerous, such as the garden, the landscape and their edgelands, is a counter-image to the suffocating control of language and space.

Prof Anne Storch, born in 1968 in Frankfurt am Main, teaches African Studies at the University of Cologne. Her long-standing research focuses on topics including the secret and sacred in language, creative language use, Indigenous theories of communicative practices, and the resulting critical engagement with the colonial foundations of linguistics and its patriarchal orders. For years, her work has also intensively explored language in the context of hospitality and healing, and she increasingly explores this topic in creative projects. In doing so, she develops different ways of telling stories and interweaving diverse knowledges than those previously envisioned in academic practices.