"I never proceed in the writing / making process consciously thinking about hybridity; instead, my practice revolves around life emotions and actions done because they feel essential..."

A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Root Fractures (2024). Her video work has recently been exhibited at the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art. Diana is a Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective She Who Has No Master(s). A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she currently teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS:

Eclipses [excerpt]

Artist Reflection

Every year around the time of the anniversary of my brother's death, I revisit the family portraits where my brother cut himself out. These cutout photographs have become a kind of ancestor that I treat as if part of my ritual practice with an ancestor altar. That is to say, I carefully and tenderly hold space and time with the images, then pour myself in thought into the literal spaces of the photograph. This one particular year, I reflected on the act of tracing around one’s body in order to remove it from its frame and context. Instead of doing this with a physical blade, as my brother did, I used a lasso tool in an image editing program, zooming into the collective body of the family. When I finished tracing around our family shape, I hit “delete,” expecting an instant erasure, for a white void to fill in the space I had traced. Instead, and somewhat remarkably, the family faces and bodies disappeared, but instead of white space replacing those bodies, the background material filled in. So, in this case, bamboo filled in where the family had been, the stucco wall replicated itself, and so on. It was so uncanny but also feels very true to how things move on—the landscape continues to grow or exist, regardless of whether or not the living bodies are there anymore. Which is to say—I never proceed in the writing / making process consciously thinking about hybridity; instead, my practice revolves around life emotions and actions done because they feel essential—in my constantly evolving grief for my deceased brother, I return to the altar of where his absence is, and try to look and listen carefully in that liminal space; this often involves then entering physically into the photographic archive in some way. To find where I might speak, where language might emerge in the rupture and new layers.