“Appeartus” is a series of narratives about Asian transborderers and migration. For example, kobayashi has created “a bicycle radio station” to capture transborderers’ mutterings. With this, they experiment with “Poetry Riding” – a way to compose poetry by muttering while cycling. kobayashi calls transborderers people who transcend language (i.e., a state of living outside one’s mother tongue) and queerness (i.e., a state of being outside heteronormativity).
In “Appeartus”, kobayashi focuses on the act of appearing; the moment of exposing words through his apparatus and essayfilm. kobayashi created a bicycle apparatus that projects a speaker’s actual lips onto the ground and uses it to capture the moment the words are spoken. The light turns on in conjunction with his and the guest’s speech, and the image of his/guest’s lips is projected onto the ground. As both cycle frantically while talking continuously and desperately, their words become scattered. Just like a Sprachspiel by Eugene Jolas, the personal scatters in migration, where multiple languages dissolve and are appreciated.
Furthermore, from the perspective of poetry, kobayashi created this practice through Sprachspiel*1, as if each language were a sound. Differences among languages are loosened from the peculiar Berliner saying, “English or Deutsch?” Through this original language system, the personal scatters among Asian transborderers are depicted.
《Appeartus #0》Performance / 2024
at Universität der Künste Berlin, Berlin, Germany
《Appeartus #0》Video Installation / Size variable / 2023
at Universität der Künste Berlin, Berlin, Germany
I talked with Hangil Jang, a Korean-American friend of mine in Berlin, on Zoom. We talked about personal experiences with pronunciation and identity. For example, Hangil’s younger sister pointed out his accent during language acquisition. While listening to his voice at our last Zoom conversation, I rode a bicycle with a mask-shaped apparatus. Images of my lips are projected as I mutter. The words are scattered through my poetry, riding on that I continuously and desperately mutter. The words from the mutterings are projected onto the wall as poetry.
《Appeartus #0》Video Installation / Size variable / 2024
at Solo Exhibition “Polyparole”, Art Center BUG, Tokyo
Photo by Eiri Motoyoshi
*1Eugene Jolas, an editor and writer, published “Words from the Deluge” based on his experiences with migrants during the First World War. The migrants included salespeople, delivery personnel, photographers, station staff, track drivers, and others. Jolas was inspired by their phonetic novelty and recreated the narrative of migrants in an industrial area in the United States through multilingual poetry.
Jolas’s approach to the Sprachspiel is evolving. Specifically, the aforementioned poetry consisted of a single sentence in multiple languages. However, in “Babel: Across Frontiers”, most sentences are in English, while only a few significant parts are in the other language. To do so, Jolas represents his position on the European language war.