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

In Manual para desarmar la memoria / 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.

Ana Rocío Jouli (Research Area 2: Travelling Matters) and Camilo Baquero Burgos are the editors of this handbook, for which Ezequiel Zaidenwerg provided the English translation. It was created within the Activation Lab, a space for collective research and experimentation on Latin American documentary poetry, developed as part of Jouli's EXC 2020 research project. The volume was conceived and realised in collaboration with Trashumantes, a migratory and participatory publishing project that produces books through collective processes, with the support of Haus für Poesie, Bezirkszentralbibliothek Pablo Neruda and the festival Barrio | Bairro Berlin.

Ana Rocío Jouli, Camilo Baquero Burgos (Eds.): Manual para desarmar la memoria. Poesía documental latinoamericana / Handbook for Dismantling Memory. Documentary Poetry from Latin America. English translation by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg. Berlin: Trashumantes 2025.