Poetica Magica is a project by Literaturhaus Vorarlberg in collaboration with ZeLT – European Center for Literature and Translation in which poets and illustrators/animators collaborate to create short animated poetry videos.
I had the honour and pleasure to work on Martin Piekar’s poem “i am sic”, a wonderful piece that goes deep under your skin.
Unfortunately I don’t have an official English translation for the poem, so you’ll have to live with my amateurish one here:
i am sic – she says & pulls a slice of skin from her forearm
she wants to be called patchwork & build theseus’ ship
once a week she anaesthetises herself for clarity
& swaps one patch of skin for another
she wants to know how often she has to change her skin
to feel comfortable in a new one
she asks if I know this
being born into this falling dream
here under a bridge, always under a bridge
we watch the blood coagulate
she cuts another piece from her calf
I’m not looking for anything under the skin, she says
you can recognise a tissue’s authority just by looking at it
she says & needle & thread
many think I’m looking for bugs or chips
but I’m only interested in skin
we fascinate each other until I go through the eye of the needle
she leans against the pillar, aesthetic like people if exhausted from sport
& sews herself up, i am sic, she says
you know, I never woke up from a dream
To me this is a piece about identity, change and change over time.
It took me some time to figure out how to approach this animation. One thing I knew from the beginning though: I wanted the images to add a further layer to the poem, create what is sometimes called generative dissonance, where the images and the text work on different levels, the combination of them generating new meaning. I was very captivated by the dream-like, dark and brooding mood of the poem. I tried to imagine what kind of skin the protagonist would sew onto herself, and then expanded on that in a surreal way.
The question remains: how often do you have to change pieces of yourself, to feel like somebody new? Or maybe life does that one way or the other.
