I Speak As a Twin
Durational performance installation
28 minutes
2022
In my continued investigation of language and its relationship to personal and collective memory and identity, I disrupt the intended didactic function of an Indonesian-English dictionary by dissolving its pages in water and imprinting it on my body. Since moving to the United States, I have located increasing discrepancies in both my English and Indonesian speech; my code switching has become more erratic, yet I find myself failing to quickly recall accurate words and or translations for either language. This happens most significantly when I am calling my mother, who is also bilingual; the audio from this performance was the last phone call between us before she left Indonesia to visit me this past month. At the time I performed this piece, she was already in the air, levitating between an uncertain zone of space and time, mirroring the consequences of my own migration.
The title of this piece is lifted from Don Mee Choi’s essay Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-Neocolonial Mode. Choi writes: "(...) even within my so-called mother-tongue, I was already born with a tongue with a task to translate, but motherless and expelled from power." I speak as a twin - as a retranslation of a history of erasure and assimilation.
Re voicing - the naming leads to the unnaming
Performance, glass, sound
10 minutes
November 2023
I spell my name with your voice. It reveals itself in the sky, the same one we look at, 12 hours apart. It travels.
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Inspired by my ongoing research into the discrimination of Chinese-Indonesian communities during the Indonesian New Order (Orde Baru) of 1965-1998, as well as the writings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-Ha, I recite a sound composition through blown glass vessels. Phonetic recitations of my name and my mother’s name are interspersed with my own writing, referencing the policy enforced on Chinese migrants to assimilate in Indonesia by changing their name to a more "Indonesian sounding name". As I speak, the glass alters the quality and resonance of my voice, reflecting the absurdity of such policies and my own reckoning with my family's history of assimilation.
Performed as part of Dry Run: A Night of Student Performance Art, organized by Franklin Furnace, PerformVu, and Pratt Institute
Performed at the Pratt Institute Student Union
Video credit: Tsubasa Berg