Interview #208 —Chi Tran

by Danny Silva Soberano

Chi Tran is a writer and filmmaker. Her work is heavily influenced by physics, slow cinema, genetic memory, and faith. She has exhibited and published widely, including with ACCA, MAMA, Liquid Architecture, un. magazine, Runway Journal, and LIMINAL.

Chi speaks with Danny Silva Soberano about moving through time, films that have helped shape her perspective, and writing as a means for learning.

It’s interesting to me that you never studied science formally, and yet you explore it in your writing. Why do you gravitate towards science in this way?

From what I understand, particle physics is the basis of everything. You can go anywhere, construct and deconstruct every material thing and every essence from there. There is so much there for me to learn. I also like to read technical writing because I often find the tone soothing. Maybe the things I am trying to understand most right now are emotion, feeling, experience, and all branches of science are a kind of framework for me to move through that. I think my understanding of time is very limited, and the most sense I can make of it is through my relationship to other people and the events that occur between us and putting it into words. Just like music, writing can help give a rhythm to things that are difficult to quantify and measure.

Even though the world of mathematics and science are culturally seen as very rigid subjects, there’s a way to make them flexible. I notice in your work that lots of themes and images repeat without a sense of self-consciousness. I admire this trait in many writers because it makes their thinking transparent. When I see people’s obsessions, I trust them more. What have your artistic obsessions been and what are they currently?

I’ve watched a lot of movies recently. When I feel like being slow or am in a research phase of filling the well again, I like to watch movies and read interviews and spend time with other people. I learn everything from the people around me. I have been gradually returning to music, which has been very nice for me.

You often talk about the impossibility of language. I see this conflict play out in your work. You use a lot of fragmentation, and you tend towards collaboration to try to reach for meaning beyond the page. It’s interesting that you explore the disruption of language via language itself. Do you find any clarity in that kind of disruption?

The most useful way for me to talk and think about language is via thinking about other things—whether that’s talking through light, physics, cells, people, history, an event. A lot of it ends up in scientific territory, not for me to establish facts or information, but because I like the structure of the scientific method. I like using measurement and data as tools for bringing meaning or clarity to something I may be questioning within myself. If I’m thinking about science as a system of forming testable explanations, I like to think about my writing as a way of making my own little predictions about myself, about things I feel or witness or learn about, about the world, my fantasies and hopes… anything.

Did you perform at your high school?

I was trained in classical music since I was very young and played through school. My relationship to music was different when I was younger. It started to feel like a responsibility, and I was a very sensitive child so the pressure was difficult for me. Now I see it very differently and I’m extremely grateful for how much I learned from my music teachers. Not just the technical skill and theory, but also about rigour, training, trust and confidence, emotions and how to express them.

So—I did hear through the grapevine that you are writing a full-length poetry manuscript. Given your feelings about the impossibility of language, do you feel complicated about writing a book?

Yes. The publishers have been very kind and patient with me. I find writing very hard. Making or writing something (especially a book) with a strong tone is a very difficult thing to do well, I think. But I continue to do it, maybe just out of stubbornness, as I’m trying to dig for something I haven’t yet found. That’s where support and motivation from other people really help me. I had my first solo exhibition earlier this year and I had a lot of fear about what to make, thinking about why I should make a certain work. And my friend Hamishi, an artist I really admire, told me, “Just make the work you want to see.” That really helped me. It was a reminder to return to myself and not let external pressures or conversations drown out my own voice.

Every time I ask someone this question, I get a complicated answer—because it is complicated to write a book of poems.

It will likely be poetic, in the sense that the feeling, the rhythm and intonation will inform the narrative structure, but I don’t think of what I write as poems. I am approaching it as a precursor to a film, a song, another kind of larger project.

What do you think is an alternative to making a book? When you said that your manuscript could be a precursor to a something else, it sounds like what you want is to transform a work over time.

I think there are many alternatives to making a book. Having a conversation with someone can sometimes feel like you are writing something together. When you learn together and research together and make breakthroughs together. I like to work with or in response to other people. I’ve always wanted to make movies since I was very young. It sounds very fanciful and a bit like a pipe dream, and it often feels like that too. So it’s been a big step for me this past year, finally letting myself step into filmmaking. In a way, my writing practice has transformed over time, to become a film-based practice.

What are some films that have had a big influence on you? Or a director you like?

Some that come to mind are Atlantics (dir. Mati Diop), Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul), Mustang (dir. Deniz Gamze Ergüven), The Gleaners and I (dir. Agnès Varda), Taming the Garden (dir. Salomé Jashi). Artists like Garrett Bradley and Arthur Jafa, too.

Do you still have an attachment towards your first chapbook, I occupy space, which is to say, i am always grieving? How would you describe this project now six years after its publication?

It was the first concrete body of work I ever wrote and it was a great experience, because it was part of a residency at Incendium Radical Library, who were very generous in supporting and encouraging me as a young writer. People I meet for the first time have sometimes brought it up with me. The only attachment I have with it now is through other people’s experience of it, which I think is all I could ask to come out of a work I’ve made. You share it with other people to give it another life. And if it lives on, I’m so grateful. If it doesn’t, that’s okay too. That is something I learned from spending time with [the poet] Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. She was hesitant to give me any advice, but the one piece she did impart on me was that, despite the fear, it is always important to share your work with others, to let it breathe.

Ocean Vuong said in an interview that he never writes for himself. I thought, whoa, that’s not something I’ve heard before.

Maybe 6 or 7 years ago, an old friend recommended me this piece called ‘The Fragility of Friendship (And Everything Else)’ by Jackie Wang, and in it she talks about how having an addressee when you write changes the texture of your writing. I’ve carried that with me ever since. I also learned from Mei-mei to see writing as a service, as contributing to understanding, or contributing to feeling, to something bigger than myself.

How do you define your arts practice? What does your arts practice look like day to day?

If I’m not actively reading or researching, it usually looks like a lot of waiting and worrying. When I’m actively researching and thinking about something a bit more, it helps me to find strings between thoughts and slowly piece them together. Or you realise that the thoughts are circles.

Who are you inspired by?

People who are not afraid to be vulnerable or honest, people who have strong determination and a strong moral compass. People who are not shy to be themselves and people with integrity. My family and my friends, of course. The people around me are always teaching me new ways of caring, new ways to be curious, new ways of seeing and understanding.

What are you listening to?

Brandy, Embaci, Zsela, Jazmine Sullivan, Galya Bisengalieva, Navy Blue, Julianna Barwick, Triad God, MHYSA, Tirzah, L’Rain, Summer Walker, Tricky, Kelis, Burial, Joan Armatrading. I am just listing people from my most recently played [list]. And it doesn’t really change that much. I like to listen to the same songs over and over, so that I can sink into them and they become like air or something.

What are some of your favourite film scores?

Maybe Fatima Al Qadiri’s score for Atlantics, the score for Jackie by Mica Levi, and Warren Ellis’ score for Mustang.

What are you reading?

I am a very slow reader. I also have a lot of books I’ve started and haven’t finished. Most recently, I’ve started reading If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin and an anthology of short stories called Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu.

How do you practice self-care?

By listening and stretching. I also learned from my best friend to put everything into my calendar. It helps me keep track of time — it almost slows time down for me and becomes like an accumulation of memories.