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 work treating translation as a generative act across film, sound, and text.

The project uses an iterative translation process—poem → soundscape → video → poem → sound—as its primary method, treating collaboration and intermedial exchange as tools for generating new forms of knowledge. Moving between these shifting forms, ideas don't remain stable: they gain new inflections, shed others, accumulate unexpected resonances.

Through these forms, the work engages with surveillance, loss of control, climate change, and the unequal distribution of power. It poses the question: what is the weight of our actions, individual and collective, and what is the legacy of what we leave behind?


The complete work comprises three interconnected pieces:
The Film: Emma Baiada's Power Manual, assembled from personal iPhone footage in re- sponse to Daniel's soundscape, which itself was created from Łukasz's impromptu spoken word pieces recorded on the street.

The Audio: Released digitally and on cassette tape, featuring two pieces. Power Manual draws its sound directly from Emma's film. Weight Extra is built from the original street re- cordings by Łukasz, layered with field recordings, and featuring Julian Sartorius on drums and Matthias Kohler on saxophone. Anchoring the final composition are fragments of a poem Łukasz wrote in response to Emma's film—deconstructed into spoken word edits that weave throughout the piece.

The Book: Features the full poem mapped against stills from the movie that inspired it or expand its meaning, alongside conversations between the artists.
Soon available as a digital album (with e-book), and as a physical edition pairing the book and cassette tape with digital download of the album and access to Emma's film.