HAUS FÜR POESIE

How to make poetry out of documents? How to write with and against archives?

Through techniques such as collage and erasure, documentary poetry reworks historical documents, bureaucratic papers, and media discourses, unraveling with their very words the language that speaks us into being. In Handbook for Dismantling Memory, eleven voices from the Latin American diaspora in Berlin rewrite materials like election records, migration forms, and advertisements. By reframing the verbal and visual matters of these documents, their poetics explore the archive as a political territory of resistance, belonging, and imagination.

Handbook for Dismantling Memory was created in the Activation Lab, a transdisciplinary format of the research project “Rewriting the Archive”, and translated into English by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg. This edition of the Lab was conceived and carried out in collaboration with Trashumantes, a migrant and participatory publishing project that creates books in collective settings, where writing unfolds hand in hand with artisanal practice and the poetics of editing.

The conversation will include simultaneous interpretation from Spanish into German, kindly supported by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen. This event is part of part of Barrio | Bairro Berlin 2025. The Activation Lab 2025 is a project of the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective (Freie Universität Berlin) in collaboration with Trashumantes, with the support of Haus für Poesie, Bezirkszentralbibliothek Pablo Neruda, and Barrio | Bairro Berlin.

In reading & conversation: Alejandra Morote Peralta, Alonso González, Carolina Moreira, Camila Nocua, Fernanda Mugica, Paula Hernández Hirsch, Sara Vega Rayo, Alexander Caro, Sol Tejerina, Sonia Córdova Alvéstegui, Verónica Rivera

Concept & coordination: Ana Rocío Jouli (EXC2020), Camilo Baquero Burgos (Trashumantes)