PROJECT
Poetry Exercises: an archive of (un)familiar things
Many of our experiences of life in the city are so commonplace that they are not consciously perceived. Yet it is precisely these “minor” experiences that define our inhabiting the city. The archive of (un)familiar things collects such stories of inhabiting and passes them on to visitors. Three performers exercise themselves in a self-invented practice of storytelling, going beyond a merely functional way of speaking. In their Poetry Exercises, which take place in the space between the storytellers and the listeners, the nomadic archive enters into a dialogue with the official collection of the Frankfurt Institute for City History.
The goal of the Poetry Exercises is to search for, invent and enable a possibility for poetry within contemporary relations of production. Poetry here does not mean ‘poetic form’ in the conventional sense, but rather a self-invented practice of oral (story)telling of contemporary experiences. These storytelling exercises are tools for relating to the surrounding world and to each other. The goal of the poetry is to express the intensity of inhabiting the contemporary world.