Presented by the Embassy of Ireland in Berlin, The German Irish Vampire Festival celebrates, explores and expands a shared cultural history of Vampires in German and Irish gothic culture. The week-long festival will delve into the collective consciousness where this archetypal creature lurks, with talks, film screenings, art installation and an exhibition at transmediale studio, and closing with a specially commissioned live electronic music score to Nosferatu with Gudrun Gut and Linda and Irene Buckley.
The festival marks the 125th anniversary of Dracula (1897) by Irish author Bram Stoker and the German expressionist film Nosferatu (1922), its unofficial adaptation. Furthermore, we celebrate the 150th year since the publication of Dubliner Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla, the ground-breaking queer Vampire tale that inspired many others to follow.
The multi-disciplinary exhibition at transmediale studio features collaborative works, inspired by Vampire themes, by emerging artists from Staedelschule (with Gerard Byrne: Maximilliano Siñai, John Flindt), HGB Leipzig (with Clemens von Wedemeyer and Dieter Daniels: Adrian Hoerr, Stefania Tatiana Smolkina), HfbK Dresden (with Susan Philipsz: Veronika Pfaffinger, Patryk Kujawa), University of Limerick (with Juergen Simpson: Duncan Murphy, Manuel McCarthy), University College Cork (with Bernadette Cronin: Melissa Morrigan, Adrian McCarthy), and ATU Galway (with Ben Geoghegan: Sona Smedkova, Rocio Romero Grau) as part of the Embassy’s Creative Pathways programme in partnership with the Goethe Institute, Ireland.
For depth of understanding, film screenings of classic and contemporary Vampire films will be supplemented by talks from academics and experts featuring: Madeline Potter (The Banshee and the Death Coach: Irish Folklore and Dark Romanticism in JS Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’), Daniel Shea (The Many Ghostly Traditions of this Place: The German Romantic Origins of an Irish Vampire), and Dieter Daniels (Media Undead), and Saoirse Kerrigan hosting a Cultúr Salon on the endurance of the Vampire with an overview of the film programme.
