Vorzeichen
About the project
Decisions about which titles are deemed to be part of the literary canon are not neutral. Canonical literature reflects power structures.
Which aesthetic characteristics are considered to be ideal? Which authors do we pay attention to? With which eyes do we read their books? In music, accidental notes, such as a ♯ or a ♭, mark a shift to a different key.
Curated by Dr Maha El Hissy, Vorzeichen aims to provide impulses which disrupt the idea of a standardised, closed corpus of texts and voices. Through online readings and talks, as well as book reviews on Instagram, the series intends to open up spaces for texts and readers, different ways of reading and new perspectives on literature.
Vorzeichen was produced and funded by the Goethe-Institut's DigiLab, led by Dr Christiane Lahusen, Mareike Wittler and Diana Kral. All events were broadcast online and are now available as recordings.
Project responsibilities:
Communications and editorial content production
In January 2021, I was promoted to the Goethe-Institut’s DigiLab to oversee the creation and distribution of editorial content for Northwest Europe. Vorzeichen was a literature programme produced and managed by the DigiLab.
Although the events were hosted virtually from Denmark, since the Goethe-Institut London had the largest Instagram following in the region, we decided to use this account as the main distribution platform to share all editorial content, which included guest writer Instagram takeovers.
As the manager of the Goethe-Institut London’s social media channels, it was thus my responsibility to store, edit, schedule and publish all informative, editorial and promotional content for the project.
Being the only native English speaker in the team, I was also tasked with translating German cross-platform texts into English, preparing English-language transcripts for videos, and editing and proofreading English-language texts for the Instagram takeovers.
In the run-up to Vorzeichen events, I worked closely with internal and external stakeholders to prepare digital marketing strategies aimed at reaching diverse online audiences and boosting ticket sales. I also regularly utilised data analytical tools such as Webtrekk to collate data reports on digital engagement and presented these during strategy meetings.
You can find the digital marketing content I co-produced and published below.