MULTILINGUAL POETRY WORKSHOP
2025
TYPE
WORKSHOP
ROLE
PROJECT LEAD, PRESENTATION DESIGN
Traduttore, traditore.
This Italian phrase roughly expresses that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal. Gaps in meaning are unavoidable in translation. But what if this was a strength, not an obstacle?
Multilingual Collaborative Poetry Workshop is a 2-hour long participatory forum exploring poetry, politics and languages with a focus on a safe space for multicultural knowledge exchange through the decentralization of the English language in communication.
I played a key role in leading the direction of our participatory forum as well as the visual design of its elements. I scheduled meetings, directed and facilitated group discussions, distributed roles and guided our final workshop. The project was developed in three weeks.
The workshop had two parts; a didactic presentation and participatory activities for the making of multilingual, collaborative poetry through diverse methods. These methods include but are not limited to collage, upcycling existing literature, collective read-alouds and using digital AI tools. The presentation I designed for the workshop is shown above.
Multilingual visual posters designed by another member of the team, Chenglin Wu. The excerpts are taken from existing poems. These are integrated into the visual identity of the presentation.
Visual experiments explored while identifying the creative direction
The research process was extremely collaborative. From identifying shared interests of poetry, multilingualism and the desire to construct a space to collectively decode current affairs, each person conducted individual research and regrouped with new findings. We covered research on translation theory, existing collaborative poetry methods and case studies, and poetry’s politics, cultural history, and psychological impact.
Additionally, our workshop highlighted Ahmed Ansari’s reading of Asturo Escobar’s “Struggle towards autonomy”, which urges scholars to realize our agency and activate local knowledge. Within the walls of the English language dominant Royal College of Art, we amplified provincial dialects and international literary works, giving a voice to communities marginalized by colonialist structures. Even for students of the RCA, this process validated diverse experiences and chipped at barriers to raw, unscripted conversation.
Some of the collaborative activities for participants are the following:
Shuffled Stanzas // Based on a given image prompt and question, participants read and cut out interesting phrases from selected and printed articles, combining them to create a collaborative poem.
Written in my Words // Participants write a response to one of a number of prompts. These writings are cut up into individual words and phrases and combined with each other’s writings to create a collaborative poem.
Exquisite Collage // Looking at a given prompt, participants write as many words they can think of in any language. These words are divided into piles of noun, verb and adjective. A determined sequence of adjective, noun, verb, adjective, noun forms one of four or eight lines of a poem.
Predictive Text Poem // Using the predictive text function on smartphones, participants randomly generate a sentence which they send to a collective WhatsApp group. By reading chronologically the messages in the group chat, a collective poem is created.
The final pieces were read aloud either individually or collectively by the participants as sonic renditions. The final physical pieces are shown on the right.
Team:
Yeyoon Avis Ann, Kateryna Ishchenko, Joie Minsoo Kim, Anya Marshalleck, Joshua Ray, Nicharee Sawartsoot, Niall Underwood, Hongyin Wang, Bernice Wong, Chenglin Wu, Lin Wu