Pacific? Fabulous! up!speaking, taunting, inquiring, our writer-artists set out to cut across the surface of Magellan’s tabula rasa, losing and loosing selves to an undercurrent of history and nature, location and mobility, memory and (im)pure speculation. Fab Pac brings together Achjadi’s visual research, drawings and prints, and Lowry’s serial poetics, composed over a number of months. The repurposed imaginary re-situates a European Colonial fascination with the wilds, or more specifically with the imaginary beasts of an imagined place captured in engraved manuscripts and textiles.

Taken up here, visited and revisited, the carefully constructed source imaginary provokes a series of collaborative translations that work across media, move from visual image to text to audio and back again. Drawing on the typographical conventions of a trilingual phrase book (Dutch, English, Malay), the images and texts inflect different voices and dialogues, mapping the labours of different and differentiated bodies. Following the movement from hand to hand—from artist to writer, writer to artist—the excerpt describes a larger body of work that sets in motion a movement through which image becomes script becomes type is recopied as carefully drawn script. Viewer and reader adrift.

For more, check out TCR 3.26: Pacific poetries!