Displayed Words is an experiment in thinking with language, text, and poetry through digital format and in public space. For its third edition, Displayed Words takes place at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Haus Potsdamer Straße, where texts by Apsilon, May Ayim, Tim Etchells, Logan February, Friederike Mayröcker and Cristina Rivera Garza are presented on a digital display panel on the balcony above the main entrance. The project, continuing its aim to facilitate poetic encounters in urban space, will be accompanied by a series of readings on site and a publication. After the last two editions at Klosterruine and Rathaus Tiergarten, Displayed Words arrives at its final location at Stabi West with a new selection of texts, responding to our current time and addressing questions of identity, origin, belongingness, and the histories and memories of a place.

Displayed Words wishes to ask: 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 ...?

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.

Curation: Fabian Schöneich, Franze Hempel, Nan Xi, Mathias Zeiske
Production: Franz Hempel