Being Friends With Hannah is a public blog that exists parallel to the project “Friendship and the Correspondence of Hannah Arendt: Forgiveness, Loyalty, and Authenticity.” We invite you to participate in this project as we seek to understand what it means to be a friend and how Hannah Arendt’s letters might shed light on how friend making can be a component of amor mundi.
For the next 4 months, we will drop a letter exchange between Hannah Arendt and a member of her “tribe.” Through online conversation – Being Friends With Hannah – we hope to build a community and explore friend-making as a creative practice, a collaborative effort, and an intellectual pursuit. We encourage you to read the letters and comment. Hannah was a controversial figure so we encourage all agreements and disagreements in an effort to cultivate a public space that honors pluralistic communities.
“Friendship” is an interdisciplinary social sculpture that asks four artists to consider the role that friendship plays in our political world. The project culminates in an evening-length program of immersive art installations, participatory events, and performances. The final performance is the result of a six-month-long, creative communal process whose foundation is a collection of letters written by political theorist Hannah Arendt. Throughout the project, the artists and curators will read texts, attend public presentations, share ideas online, and participate in an exploratory workshop, all with a mind to explore friend-making as a creative practice, a collaborative effort, and an intellectual pursuit that will culminate in an immersive, public event featuring work inspired by the process.
The project is co-curated by Julia Claire Wallace and Jeanette “Joy” Harris and was commissioned by Goethe Pop-Up Houston.
“Friendship” is part of Goethe Institute’s year-long, international 2022 program titled “Hannah Arendt: Thinking is Dangerous”, which explores Arendt’s conception of thinking through dialogue, art, performance, play, music, and silence. As one of the most famous and perhaps influential thinkers of the 20th century, Arendt and her work remains an important resource in navigating and understanding our world in the 21st century.