Falschrum Center for the Rejection of Received Forms
May and June 2026, at Falschrum Books in Berlin Neukölln, the Falschrum Center for the Rejection of Received Forms continues as an in-person learning center dedicated to creative practice across, between, and beyond conventional modes. Our anti-curriculum is a series of experiments to elaborate on the pleasures which are usually peripheral, found while in pursuit of something else.
We teach in harmony with Falschrum Books’ mission of amalgamating art, literature, and research, in order to overturn expectations and create environments of possibility. The facilitators at the Center for Rejection teach exactly what they are interested in—this is not a professionalizing space, it is a space of mutation.
We are a collective of autonomous artists interested in teaching and learning for its subversive and convivial potential, we welcome you to join us. Questions? Fears? Desires? Registration? Email C. Bain
Classes take place at the Falschrum Office, Braunschweiger Str 16, Berlin.
Spring 2026
In May and June of 2026, we try a new model of short and one-off workshops.
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C. Bain teaches I Would Rather Die Than Work
May 2 & 16, 3-6pm. This is a poetry workshop asking how we can reject of capitalism once capitalism has fully invaded our own body. Participants will receive a series of creative prompts by email, over the 2 weeks between the sessions, and will have the option to work with Bain on developing a manifesto/chapbook/whatever, on the theme. We’ll read about political suicides, Luddism, sex work, and machines in flames. 40-150 Eur, scholarships available.
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Magdalena J. Härtelova teaches: Buro for Ending Things: Aktionstag for collective quitting, breaking up and ending projects
May 9, 4-7pm. A collectivist ritual for quitting things, clearing out, and moving on. 20-80 Eur, scholarships available.
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Cassie Thornton teaches SOFT MONEY POINTY MEDICINE
May 30 & 31, 5-7pm. A workshop about avenging y/our debts. What parafictions can allow us to imagine true revenge on the system?
The Chief Economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN warns that ongoing disruption to the Strait of Hormuz is triggering one of the most severe shocks to global commodity flows in years, endangering food security, agricultural production, and global markets (1). And yet our insufficient funds, ideas or mental health feels like our personal fault? We are no longer on the sidelines of the global war economy-- we are the sacrifice. Come use feral visualization, luxury breathing and collective writing to discover the hidden story of how our sacrificial intelligence(2) gets awakened so we can write out a path: collective revenge by a ton of pathetic people with nothing to lose can look just so beautiful in a global emergency. 40-150 Eur, scholarships available.
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Juliana Gleeson teaches: PICKING THE RIGHT FORM FOR THE JOB - Single Purpose Writing
June 14 & 15, 2-7pm. How do we keep our writing perverse without losing clear purpose? How do we keep our style fresh, without muddying our values? What is a punchline worth politically? With one eye on this polyphonic medley of voices and styles, Juliana will explore the history of forms (from Plato to Wynter) across day 1. Day 2 will feature in-depth participant experimention—expect your style to become both reformed and deformed. 100-150 Eur
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About your facilitators:
Juliana Gleeson is a writer and editor from west London, who now lives in east Berlin. Her pioneering anthology Transgender Marxism was published in 2021, selling over 15K copies. She is currently writing three follow-ups: Dyke Dialectics (with Alex Adamson), Inner Secretions (for Becoming Press) and Listening Like A Girl (due this November). After writing and editing extensively on social revolution, communist philosophy and gay history, she became a household name after an interview with Judith Butler proved too spicy for the British press.
She will be speaking at the TZK Misogyny symposium on her most recently published book Hermaphrodite Logic, and specifically how so-called colonial racial science came to direct interphobia. The book addresses the thinking, rhetoric and impact of the intersex movement on the history of sex (since the edgy 1990s).
Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova is a Czech-Sorbian curator, poet, organizer and a hypnotist. They wrote It Is: You Appeared Once. A Story about Potential Dimensions, Abortion, and the Blurry Appearing and Disappearing of Matter [2022, s.L.A.p] and published their poetry in several anthologies [Bridge, Berlin Untelevized, whyrwehere]. Together with John Broback, Magdalena is also a part of a poetry and synthesized music duo Lightbush. Apart from their poetic practice, you might know them as one of the founders of Casino for Social Medicine or through The Hologram project, a peer-to-peer health protocol practiced from couches all over the world.
C. Bain is a gender liminal writer and performance artist who works on the body as a site of violence. His plays have been shown at the Tank, Dixon Place, and the LGBT Center in NYC. The author of the books Debridement and Sex Augury, he makes books with Ugly Duckling Presse, Falschrum Books, and by himself. He was a 2023–24 Fulbright scholar in Leipzig, researching the end of the world.
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). Cassie wrote a popular book called The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, 2020 Pluto Press, and helped launch an international social movement demanding all caregivers be cared for. Her 2025 book for culture workers in the apocalypse, It's Too Late//Do It Anyway is available at Thick Press. She was also a cofounder for a bar that is secretly a social clinic in Berlin called The Casino for Social Medicine.
Previous Inaugural Semester - Fall 2025
Rebekah Smith taught “Feeling Translation”
Rebekah and a group of intrepid practitioners freestyled on translation, building a praxis grounded in reading and sensual attention. Seeing what unfurled from one class to the next, these feeling translators questioned, troubled, and rejoiced in the undoing of faithfulness, considering awe, movement, iteration and intuition as potentials for remaking their translation practices.
C. Bain taught “She Went Too Far: Women and Killing”
Picture it: you’ve done something suicidal, homicidal, insane, something which discredits you utterly. Picture it: there is such a thing as women and you are one. In this reading-writing class we looked at source material written by women who killed someone, or attempted to, or were treated as though they had, in order to attack and expand the categories of “woman” “writer” “victim” and “sadist”.
Magdalena J. Härtelova taught “Dept. of Para-professional Poets: Closing-Down Resistance Unit”
Magda had their victims go through a bootcamp of exercises that seemed whimsical but were in reality a strange, unsupervised group therapeutic process to uncover the hidden motivations behind how and why each person writes.
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questions? please contact C. Bain.