Organised by Ana Rocío Jouli, project Rewriting the Archive – Transdisciplinary Activations in Latin American Literature, Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters", and Camilo Baquero Burgos (Trashumantes).

Documentary poetry is a form of writing that reworks historical documents, personal archives, testimonies, and bureaucratic files to reflect on the ways in which collective memory and history are shaped by language. Through techniques such as quotation, montage and rewriting, documentary poetry activates new critical and affective connections with the past.

This installation features works created within the Activation Lab, a space for collective research and experimentation on Latin American documentary poetry. The Lab is a transdisciplinary format developed as part of Ana Rocío Jouli's postdoctoral project, Rewriting the Archive – Transdisciplinary Activations in Latin American Literature. This edition was conceived and realised in collaboration with Trashumantes, a participatory publishing project that produces books through collective processes, with the support of Haus für Poesie, Bezirkszentralbibliothek Pablo Neruda and Barrio | Bairro Berlin.

As part of this collaboration, the Activation Lab adopted the creative methodology of Trashumantes to curate a series of encounters between artists and migrants from the Latin American diaspora in Berlin. Over the course of four sessions, participants worked with documentary materials to generate a series of poetic and artistic explorations that were integrated into the collective publication Handbook for Dismantling Memory. The project now continues in this installation at the Bezirkszentralbibliothek Pablo Neruda where the encounters took place, as a way of leaving our trace in the space that made them possible. Just as the participants' texts found their place in the book, the installation highlights the work of those who conceived and facilitated the Lab's sessions.

Through collage and typographic experimentation, Argentine artist and book designer Carolina Giovagnoli invited participants to approach documentary materials with a gaze that unsettles naturalised codes and reconfigures them into new expressive possibilities. For this installation, she also created a visual collage that integrates the diverse languages and documentary references developed throughout the Activation Lab.

Through collective writing encounters, Giuliana Kiersz has developed a processual and participatory practice that opens sensitive spaces for reflection and creation. In collaboration with the Activation Lab, this method took shape as a large textile piece covered with questions about archives, memories, and the potential of poetic intervention to uncover other stories in the languages that speak us into being: a material trace of voices and encounters that becomes the artwork itself.

Created following the participatory editorial methodology of Camilo Baquero Burgos for the migrant project Trashumantes, the publication Handbook for Dismantling Memory embodies the communal processes of writing, editing, and publishing. A copy of the collectively produced book is included in the installation, ready to be picked up and read.