Giulia Ottavia Frattini
Of Rabbit Holes and Breathing.
PATRYCJA WOJCIECHOWSKA
Ever since you first agreed to speak with me for the ‘Discrete Life of Infrathin,” I have known that this particular exchange should have a truly conversational tone. Just to start, I've noted a few keywords for us to use as navigational frame . : exophonic writing, a physicality of language, a lyricism disruption, unfolding of identity, and then later on, you added these lovely ideas of pulmonic writing and phonetic alphabet system. You also jokingly mentioned a rabbit hole, which I actually would like to include. I wanted to think about your practice in the context of breath, body, self, land, and the notion of others. The reason I want to adopt this corporeal tone is because I feel you treat language in a very physical way, like flesh.
Equally, what is very present in your practice is the self. It is a constant fleeting formation and re-formation of identity in all that you do. It never really stops; it constantly moves. There is a connection between land that symbolises body and self, and in reverse, self being a metaphor of body and land, a place of their residence.
The land that you inhabit is pretty specific, which is, I think, the land of a screen, a realm of cyberscape. Even the visual language, the layout, and the way you deal with the page refer to the phone screen. Its appearance is like a presentation of the language. The physicality of the language means the others as very loosely associated with the sense of difference in a way we monitor the distance from someone other than ourselves. It may be just a different body; it may be just as well that the difference in question is more ontological.
To quote the Infrathin, this is the undefiable, smallest distance between one thing and another. This impossible to evaluate an ironic turn onto the certainty of numbers. It is impossible to measure, and yet it is there, elusive but undeniable, like the space between the trousers and the skin of your leg after it touches it. Like fleeting moments of lingering presence. The warmth of a chair that someone just vacated is like a residue of someone else that you measure by distance, either distance of difference, the distance in time, or a physical distance, your distance from others.
Sometimes others-ness may be your body or something that's associated with your body. If I'm not mistaken, you kind of write about it sometimes. I can see this in your Instagram account, starting with your profile picture. There is this person inhabiting a pixelated screen that exists within the digital space, and she holds the camera, a camera that is a phone, an object we handle every day. For hours. An object that, in a sense, is an extension of the body, but at the same time, it's something that is other. The two are ‘together’ but separated. There is a distance between them. Distance that is the smallest and undefiable. There's something I wanted to read to you. A quote comes from Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s book we spoke of.: “Breathing: Chaos and Poetry.”. He mentions another philosopher in this Friedrich Hölderlin, and it’s about poetry and the nature of poetic rhythm. He states that there is a poetic rhythm, and he emphasises the ontological meaning of rhythm itself. Foundationally, rhythm refers not only to vocal omissions or to the sound of our acoustic matter but also to the vibration of the world.
“Rhythm is the inmost vibration of the cosmos. And poetry is an attempt to tune into this cosmic vibration, this temporal vibration that is coming and coming and coming."
Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’, “Breathing. Chaos and Poetry," semiotext(e) intervention series 26, 2018, p. 17.
GIULIA OTTAVIA FRATTINI:
And also, poetry conceived as an attempt to find sintony within chaos.
The cosmos is essentially elusive. It is regulated by both order and chaos and simultaneously by the absence of the two. It is not a monolithic presence thriving on stasis but rather an energy in perpetual becoming. How do you tune in to the undetectable, then? This impossibility is most seductive.
In mythology, Chaos was often represented as a sea serpent, and I can only think of the symbol of the ouroboros, the circle with no end and no beginning. This idea of eternal making and cycling is very similar to creative production, I believe.
The structure of Bifo Berardi's book “Breathing” is interesting to me; it is divided into three parts that seemingly mirror the cyclical phases of existing: inspiration, conspiration, and expiration. And all that happens in between, I’d say, glancing at the concept of Infrathin you refer to.
The screen is definitely a threshold where contradictions can be enabled, and I always gravitate towards any form of liminality and ambiguity.
I tend to perceive language-making, both in written and spoken forms, as a physical performance—a series of gestures produced by the body, in the body, and towards another body. Here, the connection with the action of breathing fits nicely. Recently, I started practicing yoga. The discovery of respiration in this context made me think a lot about breathing, because in the end it is about presence.
Before enrolling at the Art Academy, I attended Economics and Languages for a while. There, I came across Phonetics and Phonology. I was studying English and French, and these branches of linguistics are fundamental to understanding how to pronounce words correctly. It is the study of the production and perception of speech sounds. I remember how shocked I was when the professor mentioned the organs of speech for the first time. I never recognised until that moment that language is, first and foremost, bodily modulated in that sense. Vocal cords, lips, tongue, teeth, lungs, and even the womb move and vibrate when articulating and vocalising. You create a sound, and the sound touches back to a meaning. Practicing with these organs differently according to the language you speak is fascinating.
I translated some of my poems into the phonetic alphabet: the standard written representation of speech sounds. It is quite beautiful because the signs are like hieroglyphics, and when using it, you create a sort of acoustic installation on the page. Breathing plays a crucial role.
I realised more and more how physical and visceral language is, and this helped me shape other poems. Where in my body do I feel a word or a sentence? Where does it stem from? Perhaps from the liver, the skin, or the throat. It is as if our organs and body parts radiate emotion in different ways.
Finally, exophonic writing is a fundamental point for me. I mainly write in English—certainly, English allows me to extend the reach of my work in comparison to Italian, but mostly, writing in a language that is not my native one enables me to be more experimental.
This freedom and the process of absorbing a second language make me ponder deeper about the use of certain words, their meanings, their social weight, and their etymologies. And I also grew fond of the power of punctuation. I relate to language as tangible matter that asks to be moulded continuously. When you speak in your mother tongue, it is very automatic; you are born with that linguistic system, which limits your curiosity. Learning a language and writing in this language that doesn't belong to your origins is a very different process.
PW
I am truly curious about your process in this context. In a sense, we both function in English. In my case, it happened due to the fact that I live in the UK, and use English as my first language. The change was organic.
You've chosen the language that, to a certain extent, is removed from the place that you live. Berlin, which, even though very international, is still a German-speaking city.
I wonder, how do you find it?
There is this impression that I have when I consider your work, that it's never solidified enough, almost as if the work was a reflection of how you work and how it's always in a place that is somewhere else. I don't mean only its presence in the digital sphere or on a page or the land, but that is always within a particular space that is not within us. Even though, as you said yourself, it's very physical. I think of it as something that is in the corner of an eye, a moment that is a place that is unreachable and yet, in which, we reside through the temporal experience of the poem. It comes from the deep sense of the visceral, but it is also very much removed. It has this very strange quality of being in, for lack of a better word, the Netherwhere.
I wondered that maybe that's why you also have chosen this particular form of removal from everything that binds you to the physicality of the actual environment. Because the real environment is the environment of your poetry. I think of your poems as something that I need to chase. As if they were hiding in a maze.
GOF
It is about an attraction to the fluidity of language. German doesn't attract me in that sense, for example. Italian has its own multilayered complexity. English, for me, really owns this quality of being malleable, pliable. Also, English has always, as for most of us, infiltrated my daily life. It is a creature that keeps on growing.
Poetry just happened to me during my studies in Curating. It was an international program, so lectures and books were in English. The way I started writing poetry came from this theoretical background. I was reading or listening, and usually, on a page or within a speech, a few words would stick with me. My attention fell towards them, so I would extract them from that context. Starting from those single words or sentences, I was drafting a poem.
I naturally and inevitably transpose my Italian and Mediterranean sensitivity into how I write in English. This might be visible in the grammar or syntax I use. There are two souls, two breaths that merge through poetry without ever really touching. But this creates a sort of friction anyway. Maybe that's why my poems might sound a bit ungraspable: I feel free when I allow myself to be open to making mistakes. My English is spoiled by inaccuracies, and at times, this is truly beneficial for escaping domestication.
Also, I would define my work as metamorphic. It is about unfolding. Passages and borders remain blurred or inexpressible most of the time. It may sound a bit childish, but, through writing, I do try to explore and reach my identity, questioning or even dismantling the “I”. You know, in writing, the subject becomes very evident.
It is about longing, and desire is nothing but the craved chase of a lack. I write to cut across this distance. It is also merely a matter of catching a wanting that cannot entirely be caught. It is a negotiation with sense and opacity, too. I am not so interested in plots but rather in anti-narrations.
I have this project I've been working on for some time now. It is titled “Chrysalis” and is in three stages, mirroring the phases of development from the cocoon to the butterfly. I think I can say I concluded the first one for now, which is poetry-based—it's a collection of poems, and the red thread of the whole collection is hard to detect for me, but it touches upon what I'm talking about. I use poetry as an attempt to come into being. It's a fragmented and spasmodic expression. It's visceral; it's physical; it's this exophony. You write in verses. You're trying to give a hint on an impulse, on a feeling, and it's scattered along the page, so you are trying to make sense of the world in a sort of disrupted format. It is a space where language is embedded into flesh and vice versa. SPASMODIC AND THEREFORE RHYTHMICAL is the poem I am currently working on.
PW
I feel sometimes that you purposely fragment your poetry on an almost ontological level when you say you're trying to, within the space of your poetry, write out your identity. When we started to discuss the possibility of this conversation, I mentioned Roni Horn and her work with poetry. She works with poetry in a very visual way; the poems manifest in sculptures, and the words are present physically in the works. But most importantly, what Ronnie posts is that the identity is ungraspable, that it never solidifies. It's always in the state of becoming. Always fleeting in a fluid state of sort of blurring that we were talking about. The boundaries between self and place it occupies are porous.
I think we experience it on a daily basis. The acceleration of everything has caused this sort of response within our psyche when we constantly go through recurring development. Constant chrysalis. We continuously break out of the shell just to encounter a new shell to break out from. It is in the moment of becoming; it's never before and it's never after. We are in-becoming all the time. That's the feeling I have, but I digress. You said something about the use of English and the way you were drawn to it as a language of choice.
GOF
English is, in a way, a permissive and affable language; it is relatively easy to understand how it works. This was convenient to me because I always think the moment you understand a system, you can break and disrupt it. If you don't get it, it's impossible to create an alternative. This stance allows me to imagine a different shape of the language I use.
I constantly work in translation. I find it interesting that, as a bilingual, every time you speak, you decide which part of yourself you kill. You always commit a sort of inner suicide.
Also, there is this persona that is the one writing, and then there is me. The “I” is in between. Borders are elusive. So the decision is about which part I want to keep alive in each sentence. How I overwrite myself. I don't really have an answer why English is the tool I have chosen. Simply, it resonates.
When I silence English to save Italian, it works. And when I do the opposite, it works again. For me, it's just a very nice pairing. And even if I write in English, the Italian will always be there, contained in the structure behind. I’m fond of etymologies, with reference to Ancient Greek and Latin. These origins are rooted in my way of thinking about language; I try to delve into the primaeval formations of meaning.
PW
I personally feel like we live in translation. That we translate our-selves to others every day. Perhaps, with your poetry being a hybrid of visual arts and words, you need the language that is, or the approach to the language that is, quite hybridic.
There is something that I wanted to say about breath. I don't know how you look at this, but as you know, I've been obsessed with Duchamp. Towards the end of his life when everyone thought that he stopped working with art, and while he was secretly completing Étant donnés: 1. La chute d'eau, 2. Le gaz d'éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas), of which no one really knew about, he was just pretty much playing chess and working in the library.
And he was asked, Who are you now then? Are you just a librarian? Or are you just a chess player? And he said, “Je suis un respirateur"—"I'm""a breather”. I'm a person that breathes. And that’s enough. I think he basically says that if I breathe, then I create. I create through change. I breathe in oxygen, and I breathe out the CO2, and that transformation happens within my body. So my body and my breath, are that moment of respiration, as you said. And that eternal rhythm in the body makes me creative; it changes my status from stasis of non-life to movement of creation.
In a way, when I look closely at what you do, because you have such a bodily approach to language, I want to acknowledge the notion of breath in connection to your work. Because of that constant movement, of change, of transformation that we keep on talking about, maybe this is the eternal breath. Within our bodies and within our collective cosmic body.
GOF
I do love this answer by Duchamp. Breathing and creating is such an ancestral metaphor.
Actually, when someone asked me some time ago what I was, I answered, “I'm a walker,” because I walk a lot. I really need to walk to think, and there, I'm very connected to breathing.
I take the same approach when I write, too. I move and activate different body parts to make sense (or non-sense) of myself and the world, to coexist with it.
When you walk, you have external impressions of the city, of the landscapes, of the smells, and you internalise all of it in one way or another. It is always a mutual relation, an exchange of particles. Inhalation and exhalation.
Movement is perpetual also in its apparent absence, and since poetry is movement for me, I never know how to end a poem. Sometimes, I decide to break that motion violently, maybe with a sentence that appears totally disconnected from the rest.
Talking about breathing and using that as an analogy, I perform a sort of suffocation there to move on to another writing.
You create a convulsion in time, and its tremors lead you somewhere else. Like choking a little bit and then expanding the chest and lungs for another poem. In between the verses, sometimes respiration flows spontaneously; sometimes it's just spasms. In the end, it is about creating a lot of movement. And, for me, movement is rarely harmonic; it goes from peaks to abysses.
PW
It's a little bit like Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring”. It’s such spasmodic music…
But now, another thought occurred in my mind, and it is bound to something that you mentioned—that you are, mentality-wise, somewhere close to the origins of poetry. When it was vocalisation that was breathing out performed by all beings.
I was thinking about the beginnings of Western poetry in Ancient Greece, where it was still very much connected to shamanistic rituals, about Maenads, who were going through transformational ecstasy, screaming out their poetry through their bodies’ spasmodics. And the reason I mention this is because, in a breath, there is also something else that happens with the language and with the phonetic language that you spoke of and the physicality of language, and that is the utterance; the moment when you speak out.
I think your utterances are really quite interesting because, again, they are very fragmentary. You suffocate the utterance a little, and it makes it so difficult to grasp.
I don't know how to exactly express what I feel, but there is a tactility within the language, but the language is not tangible.
GOF
Shamanism and poetry share the drive to transcend the constraints of the ordinary and are indeed strictly interrelated. Thank you for mentioning this.
I have been researching the Pythia, the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi; she served as its oracle and was known as the Oracle of Delphi. It is a figure that perhaps bridges quite well with the shaman. While researching, I found these words by Heraclitus: “The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks out nor conceals, but gives a sign.” This sentence possesses a prophetic trait and, to me, beautifully points to what poetry could be.
I am not attracted to poetry that is self-explanatory. I tend to search for the indiscernible, the unthinkable. I approach artworks similarly, and maybe that's why my connection with images is so deep. In my way of conceiving writing, I attempt to express this impossibility of having it all explained; I seek displacements. That is why the oracular way of uttering is a source of inspiration for me. It's captivating as a model because the ambiguity it entails allows freedom, failure, and transformation. And ambiguity just feels more authentic, despite authenticity being quite illusory.
Nowadays, technologies can be somehow considered the oracles of the present, they share something with seances: the idea of a network, of the Internet itself, where everything is somehow connected and evocable but still blurred and obscure. It's like a source from which you have to detect and question your beliefs. Also, from a tactile perspective, technological devices have this constant light radiating on you; you can feel the iridescence, and objects literally heat up. You stare in front of the screen, which is a sort of mirror, a void, infinite chaos.
I started writing my poetry on the Notes App of my iPhone, and it was very important for me to have my writings on a screen and in a format I could hold in my hands at any time, even in the dark. The sense of touch has always been essential.
PW
Have you seen a science fiction movie “Annihilation”? It is about this alien entity that lands on Earth, doesn't really have a body, and changes the whole environment by spreading a constant iridescence. It looks like a moving rainbow, so immaterial, and yet, it changes everything on a bodily level. It mixes DNAs and creates something new by employing mimicry. And then at one point, one of the protagonists says that the rainbow, the alien, was like a prism, a prismatic mirror that changed everything and reflected everything at the same time.
When you talk about reflection and a mirror being the internet, I thought of it as a prism. And this leads to this lovely notion of a rabbit hole that I am so fond of. What is the rabbit hole? Rabbit Hole is Alice, who went across the mirror who entered this different world that was changing according to her in a very physical way. And it was responding in a very physical way to her body. It was reflecting her.
It made me think about the Solaris Ocean, which was the ocean, which was the planet, which was the mind, which was the language. It manifested through the physical. It spoke through physical manifestations of the thought. And that's the rabbit hole I'm talking about.
I think you stated in one of your essays that you have a sculptural approach to the language. And that's why I wanted to go down that rabbit hole, exploring how poetry is a manifestation and again, a fragmentary one.
GOF
Going down the rabbit hole fits how the process of thinking works. It is, in a way, linear but not necessarily logical. And it is close to the stream of consciousness in writing, I would say. I often find myself inside this trope when in the process of making my texts. As I mentioned before, sometimes I take inspiration from books and readings. Just one word or sentence becomes relevant to me, and then I try to reshape it, and from there, I carve my textual body. Most of the time, the outcome has nothing to do with the meaning of the word I started with. For me, it feels like a rabbit hole occurring in reverse—I don't fall inside, swallowed by mere distraction; instead, it is a path or a portal that leads me to a process of unearthing; it is an ascending motion, actually.
In my essay “Poetry as Apocalypse”, which I wrote in combination with a poetry workshop I led for the Poetry Foundation, I pointed out my approach to writing, which happens as a process of removal. Writing happens to me by way of subtraction, as sculpture does, instead of through addition, more as painting works. I write and then delete, erase, and subtract some parts. What is left exposed is the ruin of the initial text, or maybe the bone of meaning, the essence of it all. This has to do with the idea of unearthing, the seemingly schizophrenic quest to which the rabbit hole takes you. This sculptural approach serves as an anchor to avoid getting lost in the quest. It helps me to understand the difference between navigating the infinite and trying to put the infinite on the page. So, I would say that I sculpt while I write to some extent, and I like the fact that sculpting entails such a physical endeavour and multi-dimensionality.
The very title of the essay has to do with this dynamic of removal. Apocalypse is a word I learnt to regard not with its catastrophic connotation of “The End,” a vision dominated by a spreading sentiment of doom, but rather in its literal and etymological meaning of revelation (from Ancient Greek apokálypsis, the word is a derivative of apokalýptein, “to uncover, disclose, reveal”).
The notion of revelation is quite sculptural for me. You reveal because you remove layers, you sculpt away, and you reach some sort of (un)consciousness and "knowledge." Most of the time, knowledge is uncomfortable, yet it is more about the process than the finding.
PW
Like Michelangelo and his slaves, right? He always was saying that the body, the sculpture, was already in the stone. It had to be uncovered, liberated.
GOF
Exactly. And I also think that in every artistic practice, you have to have the courage to accept when to end a piece. Having this metaphor of sculpting was helpful in this sense. I can't go on sculpting away, editing forever; otherwise, I'm left with nothing. Meanwhile, in painting, you can go over paint several times, perhaps. In sculpture, there is usually no way back from a cut.
PW
Painting is a little bit more forgiving. That is very true.
Let’s briefly speak about lyricism disruption. I think, in a sense, it's connected to exowriting. I was told by Kyriaki Goni when we spoke in this project that in the Greek language there are two words that describe hearing. And what distinguishes them is the level of investment in the act. Listening or attentive listening, putting your ear to the things. I find it really quite beautiful—this notion of attentive listening. What is important is that it is embedded within the language, within the vocabulary. As a result, it changes the approach to relationships with everything: in conversation, with the language, with the others altogether, not only other people but other beings and entities.
GOF
When one speaks or writes, more attentive listening instead of just hearing is generally contemplated. Also subconsciously.
Attention needs to be nurtured, and concepts need to be digested. Sometimes, one tends to reject things when diverging from expectations. I can imagine that when you read my poems, at first it can be a bit rejecting. It seems to me that readers normally aim to understand with immediacy. Digestion in that sense requires will and time, but most of all a loosening of preconceptions. The readership, or the audience, is essential to opening up what goes beyond the mere poem, I think. There is a universe around what can be the poem, which actually dwells outside of the poem itself. Distance and closeness intertwine with each other.
For me, one of the most rewarding events that can come about to a writer is if the reader engages in re-reading, either to reinforce the rejection or to get somewhere else. The second encounter that occurs within a key sentence. It is almost impossible to tell in advance what this is truly about. You just perceive it, I guess.
PW
Like a vanishing point, right?
GOF
It is also an anchor paradoxically.
PW
Yes, it could be an anchoring point, that key verse that you mentioned, but I don't think you have an anchor. There really is no ground to anchor to down below. The rabbit hole goes on endlessly. I have to say that your poetry is quite difficult, fragmented, and ungraspable, but I find these qualities very seductive. It really enfolds the reader in an act of attentive listening, attentive reading, and attentive watching, as they also engage in different forms of experiencing poetry, so to speak.
Recently I saw this incredibly eerie and very, very scary and very, very beautiful, at the same time, I suppose oracle-like, video from NASA with recorded sound coming out of the Black Hole. Sound, which was this rhythm and breath and darkness and something so alien and so strange. Yet, incredibly, you find yourself drawn to it. It really is a rabbit hole, isn't it?
I don't know. It was pretty... The feeling was sort of similar to my response to a video, which was something that I found almost profound, despite the fact that it was so abstract that if not for the commentary, you wouldn't probably know what you're looking at. It was the video from the Solar Probe as it was passing by the Milky Way. It looked like just some particles moving around you, and then you realised that these were stars and the galaxy itself and that sense of, again, rabbit hole. The vastness that speaks to you on this simultaneously very abstract and almost a Zero-One form of language, being also very bodily, very much scale out of scale, led me to this place of Elsewhere. I think in a way it reflects how I think about your poetry. An anchor that you need to find. The way you need to pay attention to find your bearings around it. And you know that you will never find them completely, that there will always be a sort of wobbly feeling to it. ‘I'm not standing on my ground here, I'm going down the rabbit hole; there is no question about it."
GOF
I once found out about Saturn’s rings’ sound. It is incredibly uncanny. It is a noise that comes from out of time, and, in such a state, feelings are not so detectable anymore.
I suppose I am not able to provide solace or guidance to the reader with my poetry. This somehow mirrors my way of existing. I think if you want some sort of quiet, you don't quite find that in poetry.
PW
The last thing that I wanted to talk about in a very literal sense reflects that category of others. And that is the workshop that you did for the Poetry Foundation. I read the text written for the workshop, which contained your thoughts on the Apocalypse. You also set up the workshop as a ritual. We spoke today about the Oracle. I wanted to ask you how it felt to create an experience of poetry in a ritualistic way with others. And again, it happened online. I think that's also quite important that it wasn't a bodily presence of a gathering.
GOF
The ritual structure was critical in giving order to the workshop sections. I divided it into three phases: the first was Initiation, the second was Transformation, and the last was Recollection. Also, the ritual is a metamorphic process. You go through a transition.
As it was an online workshop, I wished to give a somewhat spiritual feel to it and touch upon a more inner level. I implicitly asked the attendees to bring something uniquely personal into the workshop, specifically because performing a ritual is about holding onto what is most intimate and secret.
I wanted to create a path into the workshop. Online, it's very challenging to keep the engagement alive. It isn't easy to build empathy. This structure helped in that sense to create a participative environment, a trigger, and a bond, even if temporary.
It has been rewarding to hear from the participants afterwards that the workshop was a starting point for them to dive somewhere else, without “guidance” once offline.
The ritual is life itself, and I felt this was a good image for the purpose of a poetry workshop.
PW
What you've done is essentially a rite of passage. These are the stages: preliminal, liminal, and postliminal; the withdrawal from society, the change, and the return. It's an initiation; you pass the threshold, and then you incorporate the transformation in the life after. There is something liminal about the way you overall approach poetry. It's like liminal spaces that we experience in real life, and some of them are very ancient, like stone circles. I live in Britain, and I've been quite obsessed with them. One of the main reasons is because it's an architecture that is made for the change, for the transformation. It never stays still. You have a stone; you have a gap. It's an enclosure, but it's outside. It's inside, but it's a part of land. It's constantly becoming something different; you almost feel how it moves; it fluxes continuously. The same thing happens when you stand in a doorway; you're never either inside or outside. You're sort of both and neither at the same time. And in a way, for me, digital has this equivalent quality when the glitch happens.
The way you present your poetry, especially on Instagram, is like a glitch. It has this jarring quality and aesthetic that makes you stop in this place that you can't really define and recognise where you are. As we were saying before, this idea of attention is in contrast with, for example, Instagram, when you just scroll the stories, one after the other, and then there is one that you really cannot pass. Maybe you have to listen more carefully or to look more carefully at the image, the video, or the text, whatever it is.
GOF
In the beginning, Instagram was my main space for sharing poetry. Now I don’t use it anymore as before. I would post screenshots of poems composed directly in the Notes App—this relatively little but luminous white page was a stimulus to make myself easily visible out there and a push to expose my work.
Since Instagram was born as an image-based social network where text is definitely secondary, the intrusion of poetry into Instagram felt like a combination of opposites. This discordance was interesting to explore and to ignite. And this is perhaps closer to the glitch you mention.
It also allows me to compose a diaristic archive to combine poems with pictures.
PW
It was such a long time ago when ‘The Matrix’ came out; you were a baby at that time! Anyway, there are two moments I want to recall. First, the déjà vu, as happened in the movie, when a black cat disappeared and then reappeared, and there was another black cat walking the same way. Like a glitch. It makes me think about your poems appearing on Instagram. You notice that there is something different. It's almost like a deja vu, but it isn’t at the same time. The second moment is where Neo goes through his Kung Fu training and Morpheus asks him, “Do you think you breathe in the air now?” I think it circles back to this notion of breath that we were talking about, that it's a cosmic rhythm of the world, but here it's set in the digital space that we moved ourselves into, and the breath is still there, but it's different; it's ironic, maybe convulsive, maybe spasmodic, and it does not necessarily need air.
GOF
Existing between these two realms is indeed like a constant convulsion, or hiccup, perhaps.
PW
I like that.
I'm pretty much the same. With my paintings, I always knew when to end them. There was this visceral feeling to stop. But with the writing, it never stops for me. I keep on editing.
It was such a great conversation. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me.
Giulia Ottavia Frattini
is a poet and writer based between Berlin and Milano.
She studied Art Communication and Didactics at Brera Fine Art Academy and pursued Advanced Studies in Curating at Zurich University of the Arts. She is currently enrolled in the Master Programme in Cultural, Intellectual and Visual History at the University of Milan.
Her practice lies at the intersection of writing, art and critical theory. She intends language as the essential medium through which subjectivities inhabit the perpetual “now”. In her writings, she deals with the experience of self-determination and identity definition, exophonic writing, the physicality of language and anti-narrative textual forms.
Her words have appeared in several outlets, including single-poem publications, interviews in art magazines, and hybrid contributions. In 2023, she was selected as a Visiting Teaching Artist at the Poetry Foundation. The same year, she self-published a poetry chapbook titled “CHRYSALIS” in limited printing.
