Every tongue, that wound my heart
By Nilufar Karimi & Eliseo Ortiz
In “Every tongue, that wound my heart,” you can click on each country to hear the portion of its anthem which uses the corporeal words “heart” and “eye.” As you move across each country, its anthem continues to play until, eventually, the layering of anthems creates an overwhelming dissonance.
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In “Words for a Preface” from Still Hear the Wound, Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come, Lee Chonghwa writes of memory stored in the body across generations:
“The time of waiting for the body offering
The time for those sleeping testimonies to stop breathing again,
to be alive, tolerating
to become corporeal
The time to dissolve and release the lumps of those distant memories
for the time of the body offering“
–transl. Rebecca Jennison and Yoshida Yutaka
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What does your body do when it listens to a national anthem?
What do you see?
What does your mother/grandmother/friend see?
How does your heart beat?
How does your mother/grandmother/friend’s heart beat?
