Before the Poem

Installation · 2026

In old myth, tears were kept in small vials—witnesses of grief that travel with the dead. The vial exceeds storage and becomes the body’s companion: its mirror and its metaphor. Long before the genocide my tears had run dry; grief settled in the body without a tongue. The genocide bound speech further, turning sorrow into a sealed anger with no passage. I return, then, to the first language: tears that condense and widen until they ask for a flood—one that washes the world and rearranges earth, human, and language. The martyrs arrive with many faces; each face summons its own grief. When elegy fails, the work gives speech back to salt and light. The vial, a figure of the body, once held sorrow; now it overflows. a first elegy without speech.