Dirk Huelstrunk

Writer, soundpoet, audio artist<br />

Intuitive sound art transformations

HuelsTrunk is a soundpoet, spoken word poet, writer, minimalist, creative writing teacher and curator of art/poetry events from Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Influences range from Dada, Surrealists, Fluxus, Beatpoets to Pop and modern electronic sound-poetry.

He frequently collaborates with artists & musicians and is founder of the improvising jazz-poetry performance project SOUNDS LIKE POETRY? Since 2011 collaboration with finnish performance artist Juha Valkeapää as JIRK.

HuelsTrunk has performed live all over Germany, many European countries and the US. He is giving lectures and workshops on performance poetry at schools and universities and Goethe Institute. He is also one of the pioneers of the Poetry Slam Movement in Germany, organizing Poetry Slam, Spoken Word events and Festivals since 1996.

Being a sound poet I am fascinated by the pure sound of Finnish, quite far from my native German tongue & I am very interested to enlarge my sound vocabulary.

During my stay at Saari I would like to continue and further develop my concept ofintuitive sound art transformation that evolved during my work with performance artist Juha Valkeapää from Helsinki in 2011.

The aim of intuitive sound art transformation is not to provide another tool for accurate text translation from one (written) language to another. It rather focuses on the poetic process of transformation, creating something new in the gap between two languages, two people, between different genres, between artist and recipient, etc. I cannot not deny the fact that understanding is sometimes impossible. Misunderstanding is always possible but necessary to ferment the transformation process.

In Saari I would like to experiment with the sound possibilities of Finnish and German Language and to continue the collaborative work with Juha Valkeapää, concentrating on soundpieces about bodyparts and body function, aiming at a series of live performances in Finland and Germany.

Further I would like to develop these ideas into a radio play (working title: Übersetzungsmaschine/Translating Machine) translating one bodypart/bodyfunction into another.

During my stay in Saari I would like to research about the finnish Soundpoetry Scene, that is rather unknown of in Germany and would like to exchange ideas and collaborate.

Networking is a crucial and integrative part of my Art.