9–11 July | Exhibition: Among Waves. A Sound Installation by Kollektiv »kaboom« and The Poetry Project
Part of the EXC 2020 Annual Conference 2025 "Futures of Doing Literature", 9–11 July 2025.
The exhibition will be open for the entire duration of the conference from Wednesday, 15:30 to Friday, 19:00.An Exhibition Talk will take place on Friday, from 16:30 to 17:30.
When we engage with contemporary poetry, we not only encounter current discourses or utopias of the future, but also the literatures, experiences and blank spaces of previous generations. What images of the past are created by poems? How do they shape our present? And what influences do our own lived realities exert on the reception of lyric texts?
It was with these questions in mind that the literary collective »kaboom« invited The Poetry Project to embark on a search for the ghosts of the past speaking from the poem "Angekommen in Ahrenshoop" by the German writer Elke Erb (1938–2024), a text deeply concerned with the poet's own memories and impending mortality. The result was a multilingual tapestry of sound that invites listeners to immerse themselves in the poem's layers of meaning and thus to explore their own language of remembrance.
First shown in October 2024 during the conference "Enter the Ghosts. Formen des Nachlebens in der Lyrik" at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB), the sound installation is made up of contributions by fourteen poets and translators: Jamal Abasi, Rahmetullah Berxwedan Andan, Ali Bakhouri, Fevzi Çetin, Dilber Çıray, Anastasiia Dunaieva, Shahzamir Hataki, Idil Korkut, Nadiia Kulish, Levke Nissen, Abdul Ahmad Pouya, Theresa Rüger, Maryam Sarshar and Jasmin Veeh. Five objects selected by The Poetry Project, Ronya Othmann (writer and journalist), Özlem Dündar (writer) and »kaboom« form visual points of reference and fulfil a quasi-totemic function as symbolic links between the past, the present and the future.
Kollektiv »kaboom« uses poetry as a springboard for the development of installations, interventions and exhibition concepts on topics such as resistance, activism and memory culture, bringing people together in search of new perspectives and a common language.
The Poetry Project creates spaces for young people from refugee backgrounds to express their experiences in and through poems. By transposing feelings and personal stories into verse, the unspeakable can be articulated – and what once seemed 'foreign' suddenly becomes much more familiar.
