✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧Lifeworlds✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

What happens when digital worlds end?

Multilingual Poetry

Upon navigating past the instructions page and into Plunge!, the first poem encountered is strikingly an instance of multilingual poetry:

“Used to swim alone and go with the drift.
Solitaire
Seek to be released from the crowd”

Drawing from the French word for lonely, Gramich points to her background as an artist of cross-cultural identity. In the artists own words, “Being of mixed ethnicity (Eurasian), I don’t identify myself as belonging to one specific culture/country, but as having mixed-cultural identity. My art questions the notion of chaos and order in space and time from this mixed-cultural upbringing, woman artist point of view, and visualizing an acknowledgement of difference in ideas, possibilities, and art-language. A feminist point of view has definitely empowered me.”¹

These multilingual tactics recall the works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, with her book Dictée (1982) employing multilingual texuality across Korean, Latin, French, English, and Chinese.

• ¹ Saraswati Gramich, as quoted in Irina Aristarkhova, “Happy Endings: Engagements with Women Artists in Singapore” in Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices, ed. Faith Wilding, Michelle Wright, and Maria Fernández (New York: Autonomedia, 2003).