Diaspora Poem

Diaspora Poem is a interactive installation that brings together the creator’s past and present in the form of a three part poem that is physically displayed on three wooden wheels.

Diaspora Poem adapts the linguistic, paginal medium of writing and reading poetry after atrocity to a material reality. The interactive piece, with its 6 x 3 ft frame, features three drums which turn via a casket-crank powered by its audience-reader. Each drum contains 46 lines of poetry, and each line is laser-etched on an individual 8 ½ x ¾ inch piece of wood. As the drums are turned by the audience-reader, they create new iterations of the same poem as each drum moves at a different rate. They mimic the movement of a past physical, forced diaspora. Each drum represents one of the diasporas that forced the poet’s family to abandon their homeland: the Armenian Genocide, the early 20th century pogroms in the Ukraine, and the Holocaust. Lastly, the mechanisms of turning these drums mimic how, in working with atrocity archives, the poet, the audience-reader, and the language all become agents that participate in this tightrope of, what Jacques Derrida calls, the “detention, retention, and interpretation” of a mangled archive. Diaspora Poem visually and linguistically manifests the relationship between the gerund that is initiated by the act of genocide and massacre, and the power dynamics that keep its drums moving.

The installation is currently on display in the Scholars’ Lab (Shannon Library 308), and will eventually travel to other locations as well.

Collaborators:

• Alexa Luborsky, Critical Makerspace Fellow 2023
• Ammon Shepherd, Makerspace Managers & Lead Research Technologist