Cia Rinne was the first guest curator of our Instagram profile

30 March 2022

Photo: Cia Rinne

In February 2022, poet Cia Rinne took over the curation of our Instagram profile for a month: she presented and commented on her own and other’s audio-visual works, thereby providing insights into her own artistic practice. In her multilingual poems, Rinne draws on the traditions of concrete poetry, but she brings them up to date in her writing and oral presentations. This multilingualism leads to reflections on linguistic theories, as in one post, for example, in which she uses the English and Swedish terms for “sentence” to explore the ambiguities and connections between “sentence” and “meaning.” In her book “sentences” (2018), she raises questions relating to the philosophy of language such as translation: “This sentence refuses to be translated.”

The materiality of language always plays a role in these artistic processes. Her book “zaroum” (2001), for example, has a unique written aesthetic, as it was written using a typewriter. Together with the artist Christian Yde Frostholm, she expanded this book into the interactive, visually animated online version “archives zaroum” (2008), in which the poems and drawings are set in motion. She also explores language in a physical, performative way in the video “L’usage du mot,” which was shown at venues like the Centre Pompidou in 2021 and of which she presents excerpts in her posts.

Cia Rinne’s oral performances can be described as precisely pronounced sound compositions that she performs live. However, there are also digital adaptations of these pieces, such as the sound work “sounds for soloist” (together with Sebastian Eskildsen, 2011) on YouTube. In this way, she reveals linguistic relationships that only come into view in artistic arrangements, as she points out in a post: “Some terms can appear to have hidden neighbors via sound and semantic shifts.”

All of the posts by Cia Rinne are permanently available on our Instagram profile.

Our Instagram profile is periodically curated by poets for one month at a time. With this series, we would like to expand on the collaborations between artistic and scholarly practice that characterize our research project, explore the possibilities of poetic practice in digital media, and bring more poetry to Instagram.