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The 97th issue of Edit Magazine is celebrating its launch at the Heiz Haus in Grünau. To mark the occasion, Jannis Weu will be reading from their piece ‘Kuckuck’.

‘Kuckuck’ by Jannis Weu observes how wage labour transforms the body and fragments time, and how the bureaucratic system in which children are embedded helps to shape them. The text is intended as a counterpoint to the progress reports and performance records that form part of everyday life in residential groups. They give the illusion of documentation, yet in doing so shape the children’s lives and experiences before they are even able to speak.

From a single sound, a syllable takes shape, an incomplete word. The narrative challenges the binary oppositions of behaviour and degeneracy, madness and sanity, the external environment and the inner world. The text weaves together poetic testimonies about the unmasking of the nuclear family—presented as a supposed space of protection and growth, but in reality a possessive, individualistic, hierarchical and brutal form of coexistence—with experiences of exhaustion drawn from the shift work of a queer educational professional. The impossibility of just care within the capitalist system echoes in images of dissolving physicality.

Jannis Weu is an artist, author and educational specialist. Jannis is currently studying in the performative arts class at the HGB and creative writing at the German Literature Institute.