textOUR - Collectivity & Care: a poetic polylogue. the ad hoc meets The Poetry Project

Ali Alzaeem's poem in Arabic will be translated into German by Sandra Hetzl. The German-language poems by the other language artists will be translated into Arabic by Sam Zamrik.

The four poets will share their writing experiences, discuss various forms of collective care, writing in and between languages and shed light on how being interwoven in collective structures and projects influences one's own artistic process.

The evening will be moderated by literary translator, author and curator Sandra Hetzl.

This project is funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.

Ali Alzaeem grew up in Idlib, Syria, and came to Germany with his family as a teenager in the summer of 2015. He writes poetry and is interested in politics and economics. He finished school in Berlin and is now studying logistics.

Jaklin Schilbaya writes poetry, initiates anti-racist projects and works as a social media manager and editor. She began her writing career as an expression of her everyday thoughts, with the aim of transforming them into art and offering others new perspectives.

Sara Hauser (* 1986 in Calw) is a poet, literary mediator and lecturer in inclusive German didactics. She studied philosophy, law, international literature and literary writing in Tübingen and Stockholm. She has been writing creatively and multilingually with young people since 2019 and has been working on her doctorate in this field since 2024. Sara is part of the poetry collective das ad hoc. Her poems have appeared in the Jahrbuch der Lyrik and Stoff aus Luft, among others.

Johanna Hühn writes poetry and occasionally translates. In 2021, "mein körper, der da wäre" was published in the DOCK 11 EXPANDED series. Further publications in BELLA triste, mosaik, Das Narr, among others.

Sandra Hetzl writes and translates contemporary Arabic literature, for example works by Haytham El Wardany, Rasha Abbas, Kadhem Khanjar, Aboud Saeed, Bushra al-Maqtari, Aref Hamza and Assaf Alassaf. In addition to poetry and prose, she has translated over two dozen plays into German, including works by Mohammad Al Attar, Mudar Alhaggi, Wael Kaddour and Rabie Mroué. She is the founder of teneleven.org, an agency collective for contemporary Arabic literature. Occasionally she also works as a disembodied voice.

Sam Zamrik is a queer writer, translator and political educator from Damascus, Syria. Zamrik worked as a band manager and songwriter in the underground music movement "New Wave of Syrian Metal". At the University of Damascus, Zamrik studied English language and literature and was involved in the founding of a poetry club for poetry written in English, which offered students a protected space for free expression. As a scholarship holder at Bard College Berlin, Zamrik earned a BA in Politics and Literature. Individual texts have been published by the WIR MACHEN DAS initiative Weiter Schreiben as well as in various German newspapers such as taz and Tagesspiegel. Zamrik's bilingual poetry debut "Ich bin nicht" was published in 2022 by Hanser Berlin Verlag, which was selected for the 2023 poetry recommendations of the German Academy for Language and Poetry

was selected. Zamrik was honored with the 2022 Wunderblock Award.

The Poetry Project is an innovative, literary dialog project that helps young people from refugee backgrounds to express their experiences in poetry. The project makes particular use of the poetic form to record feelings and stories in verse. Things that may seem unspeakable at first are thus transformed into an artistic conversation.

das ad hoc is a Berlin poetry collective that was founded in 2019 by participants of the poetry workshop open poems. It consists of 10 people, united by their enthusiasm for poetry and the desire to counter the competitive economy in the literary industry with an alternative space. The members of the collective support each other, exchange ideas about their writing processes and writing situations and share their experiences in the literary industry. The collective also meets to discuss texts and realize collective poetry projects. The members pursue different aesthetic focuses and concerns and bring different perspectives to the table: some are trained poets, others are visual artists, theater makers or scientists, for example, in addition to writing poetry. For all of them, the collective is an artistic and personal space for protection, experimentation and resonance.