6/14/25
Sat,
15:00

Writing Sports Day
House for a Boxer - Performance by Sabine Scho and Golden Diskó Ship 

Performance
Poesiefestival Berlin 2025
Akademie der Künste
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(c) Matthias Holtmann

On the southern slope of the Qurinal Hill in Rome, near the ancient Baths of Constantine, a bronze with copper inlays was unearthed in 1885. The roughly life-sized figure was considered to be late Hellenistic, dated between the fourth and first centuries BCE. It depicts either a pankratiast, an athlete who practiced the high-art of the ancient, practically ruleless full-contact sport pankration or, more likely, a simple pugilist, a boxer. Today, the figure is part of the sculpture collection of the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, which is affiliated with the National Museum of Rome. What is astonishing about the “boxer” is his modern, unheroic appearance, it is as if he stepped straight out of a novel by Nelson Algreen or Leonard Gardner or had been hired as an extra in a genre film by Robert Wise or Martin Scorsese.

Five years ago, it provided inspiration for a unique collaboration between a poet, an architect, and a sound artist. Together, Sabine Scho, Sebastian Felix Ernst, and Golden Diskó Ship (Theresa Stroetges) created a house for a boxer, an architectural sound-poem installation in twelve rounds (the richly illustrated book with the same title was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag in 2021). As part of the Writing Sports day, the project will be presented anew in a slightly modified form, a moving psychological portrait of a washed-up athlete facing the end of his career: “you can’t see / the punch coming, you have / no eyes, opaion, your / eye, cyclops, a whole house / and always on your ears / blood-clotted nose, mosaic / tombstone or an / Etruscan vase, boxer / is every scar really / jewelry to you?”

The performance takes place in the Studiofoyer.