Rain of Poems

Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus will open with a remarkable Rain of Poems, as 100,000 bookmark shaped poems, collectively weighing half a tonne, are released from a helicopter in just half an hour, to be caught by a crowd waiting on Jubilee Gardens.

The performance, carried out by Chilean arts collective Casagrande, comes to the UK for the first time and is the sixth of its kind to rain down poetry on cities that have suffered aerial bombing in the past. Part of the London Festival 2012, the project has previously taken place in Berlin, Warsaw, Guernica, Dubrovnik and Santiago and is a gesture of remembrance and a metaphor for the survival of cities and people.