From May 15 to June 15, 2025, the Poesiefestival Berlin 2025 (Berlin Poetry Festival 2025) presented poetry in all its facets with an extensive program: in addition to readings, discussions, and performances, it also featured dance, music, visual arts, photography, objects, and film, with more than 150 artistic positions. We underlined this multifaceted program with a poetic festival design.

What do
a greyhound,
a cricket ball, and
a swallow tattoo
have in common?
What do
thunder,
a scar, and
rhododendron
have in common?

This seemingly arbitrary question is at the heart of a visual-poetic exploration that provides a pictorial stage for the concepts from the lyrical texts of the festival program.
For the design, we translated these literary fragments into a visual language and developed a further poetic level that represents the various facets of poetry.

The design of the Poesiefestival Berlin unfolds a visual poem – collage-like, physical, playful. Between a flying swallow tattoo, a burnt match, a surreal image of nature and a cricket ball, a poetic space is created in which language, movement and image merge together. The oversized body fragments and organic elements (mushrooms, lightning bolts, flowers) refer to the living, the fragile, and the unconscious – central motifs of the Poesiefestival Berlin 2025.

The typographic staging does not follow a classical order: the lettering “Poesiefestival Berlin” finds its place between the images and becomes part of the collage. The entire design appears handmade, nothing is perfect, and yet everything follows its own aesthetic rules. An image full of breaks and references that whets the appetite for the unpredictable – entirely in the spirit of contemporary poetry. The font “Timezone” by Studio HanLi underlines this lyrical-experimental approach.

AG Grafik – Philip Jursch & Lennart Lofink, Art Direction and Design