Fluide Glossare is a joint project by the Lettrétage literature house and the handverlesen literary initiative. It brings together the perspectives and creative expressions of the authors Ela Beysun, Anna Julian Mendlik, Biba Oskar Nass and Jon Savkin. They have explored questions that might also give you food for thought: What might a queer language look like? How do the terms describing queer lived realities change in dialogue between deaf and hearing individuals? And how do new terms – spoken and signed – emerge to name realities that have not yet been articulated? At the heart of the project lies a poetic exchange that stems from these reflections and is inspired by the following fragment by Sappho:

“May you sleep on the breast of your delicate friend.”

This has resulted in a chain poem in German spoken and sign language – a fluid, interdisciplinary work of art that reflects the linguistic and translational processes of all the participants. Spoken poetry and sign language poetry enter into a dialogue, and the queer lived experiences of deaf and hearing people come together in a bilingual performance to create a new form of poetry. The chain poem was produced in an ongoing process: each participant passed on their poetry – whether in spoken or sign language – to the next person. In this way, a new poem emerged from the previous one, which was then further developed. In this collective creation, the complexity and fluidity of queer language coalesce into a poetic flow that makes the boundaries between languages and lived realities permeable.