Central to Hannes Schüpbach’s work are the conditions from which art emerges: moments of perception, encounter, and translation. In this project,

he responds to the lived and working environments of the poet and language activist Stephen Watts, whose practice moves between poetic research and writing. The result is a cinematographic photo installation that unfolds across space in an extended frieze, treating language not as illustration but as a field of movement, resonance, and transformation. Hannes Schüpbach is a Swiss artist whose practice spans film and painting, with a sustained interest in time, movement, and processes of experience.

The publication mirrors this dialogue in two parts. One volume is dedicated to Schüpbach’s Explosion of Words / Explosion der Wörter and includes an essay by Jo Catling; the other brings together nineteen poems by Stephen Watts, presented with German translations by Hannes Schüpbach. In this way, the book does not simply document an exhibition project, but extends it through another form of exchange between image and text, artistic response and poetic voice.

What makes the publication especially compelling is that translation becomes part of the work itself. Schüpbach’s engagement with Watts is not limited to visual interpretation; it also continues through language, in the act of translating a selection of the poems into German. The book therefore reflects the same structure as the larger project: a sustained conversation across media, languages, and forms of attention.

Published in connection with exhibitions at Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts in London, and at Strauhof in Zurich, the two-part volume brings together installation, poetry, essay, and translation in a format that is both document and continuation of the work.