Displayed Words

15.12.2023 – 30.04.2024
With Angélica Freitas, Ingeborg Bachmann, Kinga Tóth, Nhã Thuyên

Displayed Words is an experiment in thinking with language, text, and poetry through digital and public formats. Who and what defines the space in which words are made legible and meanings are produced? How does the perception of text change from one medium to another? Displayed Words plays with the intelligibility of text and its manifold displays; it also poses questions pertaining to context within which literature and poetry can be perceived and understood. Finally, it asks how text is mediated, and in which language dominant discourse and literature are communicated in a metropolitan like Berlin. What about languages considered minoritarian, those one hears across the city in everyday encounters, such as Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Vietnamese, or Spanish …?

For its second edition, Displayed Words will take place at Bürgeramt Rathaus Tiergarten, where texts are presented on a digital display panel on the balcony above the main entrance. The Bürgeramt Rathaus is a site of bureaucracy pertaining to social existence that everyone will have to come across regardless of race, gender, class, religion, status, or background. The collaboration between CCA Berlin and Bezirksamt Mitte, in cooperation with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, focuses on displaying poetry in such a public site and brings together a group of writers/artists whose practice oscillates between different fields.

These artists are working beyond conventional disciplinary borders, drawing from each medium’s specific formal characteristics, for an emancipated language to emerge. They invent new grammars and vocabularies, blending fiction with fact, poetry with politics, playing with words to create new ways of enunciating and imaging. At a time when identities are becoming more layered and meanings more fractured, the ambivalence of language as a well of resource nevertheless can generate infinite possibilities for new narratives to come.

The project also raises the question of translation, of the plurality of idioms, registers and lexicons that complicate our understanding of the world rather than reaffirm it. Displayed Words desires to refigure the relationship between writer and reader, and reflects on ways of inhabiting a living, vibrant and sometimes fragile language beyond the confines of book or page. We want to explore new ways of understanding poetry in relation to urban space, its realities, utopias and dreams, the speed at which it changes and evolves, sometimes also its mess and humdrum, and the multitude of encounters the city harbors within.

The program will be accompanied by a number of readings and talks. Further information here soon.

Bürgeramt Rathaus Berlin-Tiergarten
Mathilde-Jacob-Platz 1
10551 Berlin

Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion, project funds from Draussenstadt and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program