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.

The handbook was created within the Activation Lab, a space for collective research and experimentation on Latin American documentary poetry, which was established as part of the EXC 2020 project "Rewriting the Archive". 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.