Front cover: Screen printed onto leather-textured paper with gold ink. The book is hand-bound using stab-stitch binding.
Immigrant Blues by Li-Young Lee
How does it feel when the body and the soul are not in conjunction? Li-Young Lee's meditative piece 'Immigrant Blues' describes an immigrant’s bewilderment with the idea of internalising a second language other than their own. It unravels the main idea that is the immigrant experience, the feeling of dislocation, and sense of loss it creates.
To create this book, the poem was translated into 8 different languages: English, Spanish, German, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Hindi, and Welsh. The poem was then reassembled 8 times, with each section was written in a different language, making the poem unreadable to those who cannot understand all 8 languages (acknowledgements at end of project).
When scanned with the Artivive App, the arrival stamps at the beginning of the book, activate a 3D version of the page, along with a voiceover with all 8 languages overlapping. These, alongside the confusing nature of the voiceover, act as a metaphor for the feelings experienced by immigrants entering a country for the first time.
Scan the stamps below to try it out!
Activation of arrival stamps using the Artivive app (please scan yourself for a better quality video).
The reader must reorganise the poem, matching up each section, so that the poem is then written in a single language, and can finally be understood. The additional flap added to the cover holds the sliced sections in place whilst you complete this process.
The departure stamps at the end of the book can be scanned individually, activating a voiceover in only the corresponding language, alongside an animated translation of the poem. The act of completing the book is a metaphor for the passage of time, as well as the process of migrants becoming increasingly settled in a country that they now call home - everything starts to make sense.
Many thanks to those who helped me with the translations and voiceovers:
Chinese: Xinyu Xia
English: Bryan Dowley
German: Amelie Abraham
Hindi: Sufiyan Rakhange
Polish: Maciej Langowski & Sonia Ryszczuk
Russian: Alexey Zapuskalov
Spanish: Adriana Ruiz Leon
Welsh: Rhona Davies
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