Reading and talk with Oxana Timofeeva.
In his work Refugee Conversations, written during his exile in Finland in 1940/41, Bertolt Brecht describes emigration as ‘the best school for dialectics’. For Brecht, the dialectic of flight consists of keeping pace with the corresponding changes and transformations. Oxana Timofeeva takes up this thesis in her book How to Love a Homeland, published by Matthes & Seitz Verlag in 2020.
In 2022, Oxana Timofeeva fled to Germany as a result of the Russian attack on Ukraine, thus re-entering Brecht’s school of flight. What can we still learn from this school today? In a moderated discussion, she reflects on how personal experiences of displacement influence our forms of resistance. How can an alternative, emancipatory concept of home help us to orient ourselves in the political arena in a time marked by war and to develop new forms of solidarity? Oxana Timofeeva’s book serves as a seminal point of departure for the exhibition What Does It Mean for a Place to Be Loved, which can be seen at the ifa Gallery Berlin until 8 February, 2026.
Oxana Timofeeva is an author and a researcher at the UdK Berlin, Senior Associate at the Institute of Global Reconstitution (IGRec, Berlin), and a member of the artistic collective “Chto Delat.” Her books include Freud’s Beasty Boys (2025), Solar Politics (2022), How to Love a Homeland (2020), History of Animals (Bloomsbury 2018), This is not That (2022), and Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (2009). Her new book On the Soul is forthcoming in 2026.
Moderated by Inka Gressel
Thursday, 5 February 2026, 18:00
Language: EN and DE
