Thea Mengeler
area: Literature
Key Facts
nationality
Germanyarea
Literatureresidence
Hannoverrecommending institution
BMEIAtime period
March 2025 - April 2025Thea Mengeler, born in 1988, grew up in Krefeld and studied Literary Writing and Communication Design in Hildesheim, Kiel and Istanbul. She was a finalist at the 28th open mike and Styria Artist in Residence 2022. She currently lives as a freelance author and copywriter in Hanover. Her debut novel ‘connect’ was published by Leykam in 2022. Her second novel ‘Nach den Fähren’ was published by Wallstein in spring 2024.
Webseite: theamengeler.com
Instagram: @theshockheaded
During her residency at the MQ, Thea Mengeler will be working on the novel project ‘Öffentlicher Nahverkehr’. This novel is about gazes - especially gazes directed at women in social media. It is about the capitalist exploitation of gazes, the consumption of bodies and supposedly unfiltered insights into the lives of others. About relationships, about revenge porn, about self-empowerment. She will also be working on a long essay about cemeteries - a reflection on the cemetery as a cultural landscape, on the space we leave for death, on the capitalisation and bureaucratisation of death. But also a reflection on personal mourning, personal remembrance - in this respect, the text itself becomes a cemetery, a place where the dead lie, where they are remembered.