Period
since 2015
Proposed by
Amanda de la Garza Mata
Location
Buenos Aires
About the project
Walking aimlessly through cities, towns and rural communities of Latin America, I run into these people. I invite them to write a few poems. We spend some time together, often several days, and they dictate to me and I act as their scribe. – Dani Zelko
Reunión is an ongoing artistic and editorial project initiated by Dani Zelko in 2015. It operates as a collective experiment in listening and writing that intervenes in urgent social and political conflicts through the production of books.
The core of the project is a specific procedure. Zelko travels to different territories (cities, rural areas, borders, Indigenous lands) and meets individuals or communities. In one-to-one encounters, participants speak while he transcribes their words by hand. Each pause for breath becomes a line break, transforming oral speech into verse. Recording devices are not allowed. In subsequent days, the text is collectively revised until a final version is agreed upon; Zelko does not edit alone. The result is printed in simple, often urgent editions that are read aloud in public acts and distributed both locally and beyond. Half of the copies remain with the community; the other half circulates through Reunión.
The project evolved in two main phases. Primeras Temporadas (2015–2017) involved encounters “at random,” often produced as small fanzines printed from a portable “backpack printer.” Public readings were structured as collective events, reinforcing the idea that poems exist between people rather than on pages.
Reunión is a chain of procedures and actions for being with others. It is a system of movements and possibilities of circulation which generates spaces of encounters without hierarchies. In each encounter, the medium of words is transformed. The poems are what remain of the relationships that bring them into being. – Dani Zelko
From 2017 onward, Ediciones Urgentes shifted focus toward communities constructed as “public enemies” and facing acute violence, criminalisation or dispossession. Books such as ¿Mapuche Terrorista?, Frontera Norte, and Juan Pablo x Ivonne document counter-narratives in moments of mourning and political tension. Print runs expanded significantly, and the series functions as a living archive of present-tense resistance.
A later strand, Movimiento X la Lengua, centres explicitly on struggles over language itself—its loss, suppression, and reclamation—positioning language as political terrain.
Reunión is an anti-separation project. All of us are pieces of a system that carry words through Latin America. Words are often that which make us enter the symbolic world; they tell us ‘you are this, and this is what you’ll be’. And here the opposite happens, words are what allow us to get lost in the other. The other overflows us, the other is diluted in us and us in it. – Dani Zelko
External links
About the artist
Dani Zelko's work is made of words and people. Through various procedures, it generates publications and encounters that detonate political disputes, listening practices, and experiments with language.
Since 2015, he has carried out a work called Reunion, which has made co-productions with spaces such as Museo Reina Sofía (Spa), Fundación Proa, Palais de Glace (Arg) and Bikini Wax (Mex). Reunion has published eleven books, which have been translated into English, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Urdu, Darija, and Euskera.
