Aimée Lê

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Aimée Lê is a Vietnamese-American artist; Her work focuses on untranslatability, conceptual excess, authorial control and the ‘anecdotal’ through the lens of internationalism. She is the co-author, with Fiona Chamness, of the poetry collection Feral Citizens (Red Beard Press, 2011), and one of the founders of Occupy Dartmouth. Aimée is currently a PhD candidate in Practice-based Poetics at Royal Holloway, University of London. In Sound Acts she presented the world premiere of her project 'Aliki in Saigon', a Vietnamese/French/ English/Russian rework of the songs of Greek 60s pop movie diva Aliki Vougiouklaki, with a short accompanying lecture on multilingualism and untranslatability. In Aimée's words: "Aliki Vougiouklaki’s nostalgic countryside aesthetic, monosyllabic verbal emphasis, and soprano singing lend themselves quite well to a Vietnamese-language translation. Retaining most of Aliki’s original melodies to produce an uncanny ‘double’ and using backing karaoke tracks created by Filtig, I will perform a live set of several of Aliki’s most popular songs with the lyrics translated from Greek into Vietnamese (with small snatches in French, English and Russian, the most commonly found Western languages in Vietnam, which roughly correlate to three historical periods: French colonialism, American military occupation, and Soviet communism). The result is an internationalist pastiche that calls attention to the libidinal excess of performance over meaning."
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