Power Manual / Weight Extra

Power Manual / Weight Extra
Berlin-based poet Łukasz Polowczyk, Swiss musician Daniel Jakob, and American filmmaker Emma Baiada present Power Manual / Weight Extra — a collaborative installation that uses translation as both method and subject, tracing what happens to urgent ideas when they move between bodies, media, and forms.

The work unfolds as a feedback loop: improvised poem → soundscape → video → poem → sound. Polowczyk cycled through Berlin, improvising poems on location in response to sound, surveillance infrastructure, and the friction between natural and human-made space. Jakob dismantled the recordings before listening to the words, treating voice as raw instrument. Baiada paired the resulting soundscapes with personal iPhone footage and found that every form of power she’d captured — an arrest, a tool, a camera, a communal ritual — was wielded by hands. Her film generated a second poem, which re-entered the music and reshaped its structure.

Surveillance, climate, labor, control: these aren’t backdrops. They’re material being actively transformed at each stage. Moving urgent ideas across media doesn’t illustrate them — it reveals dimensions a single form cannot access. The project wasn’t after synthesis. It was after the seams. At Kurt-Kurt, the installation becomes a space you navigate rather than observe — tracking a gesture as it becomes a rhythm, a phrase as it migrates from voice to page, sound to image. What you encounter isn’t explanation but evidence: the work shows its own making.

Power Manual / Weight Extra is accompanied by a limited-edition double-sided cassette and book released on Adventurous Music, Leipzig, documenting the full process. The exhibition includes artist talks, live performances, and a finissage concert throughout its run.