Wordtrip Warm-up with Writer Sari Arent

Each year come springtime, Paris Lit Up typically embarks on a poetry tour on which artists share their work, interact with other literary communities, and cultivate fresh, artistic relationships.

This year in lieu of the tour, we’re taking the principle of cross-country creative discovery, and going even further. We’ve partnered with Oliver Cable, a London-based poet, producer, and previous PLU collaborator, to journey around Europe, stopping to meet an artist from each member-state as if we were on a real roadtrip.

Each day over the course of a week, we’ll publish a series of these artists’ three-minute videos, grouped by neighboring countries, to share their creative expression of their current experience. This is a means of documenting and opening our eyes and ears to other voices and languages. This is our first ever, Wordtrip.

The daily videos will air at 8.30 pm CET and run between 20-30 minutes in total. Each video will be aired live on Paris Lit Up’s Facebook page, and then posted on the Wordtrip Europe YouTube channel. For more information about the schedule, look here.

In anticipation of our June 1st launch, we talked with Sari Arent, one of the participating poets from Denmark. She’s spent the past two years writing her Masters in Paris, was published in PLU7, and performed at the magazine launch.

1. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you first became involved with Paris Lit Up? What projects have you contributed to over the years? And what are you working on now?

    I first discovered Paris Lit Up when I did an Erasmus in 2015 and spent six months in Paris. This was during my Bachelor’s in Literature, and I was studying at Paris Diderot. My experience in Paris was completely French, but then I discovered this expat literary community and really loved the atmosphere. 

    I went back to Copenhagen for three years to finish my studies and then came back to Paris and lived here while working on my Masters. I’d switched to Cross Cultural Studies because Literature was too much about reading books about books, and I was more interested in what literature does to people and how it affects us on a daily basis. I thought Paris Lit Up would be an interesting topic of my thesis, since it’s an example of socializing combined with art and literature. The community was so welcoming, and I immediately had more than enough people to interview for my research.

    Right now I’m working on a project called Blå Time, which includes the video we made for the WordTrip. It’s a collaboration with Yann Lorang who’s a French pianist I met in Paris. He composes original music and I read my work over it. So I’m taking old texts and putting new life to them.

Sari performing the piece she published in the PLU7 magazine launch. Photo by Ige Egal.

2. How does it feel to be participating in a project that joins artists from fifty-one different countries?

As I often do when collaborating with Paris Lit Up, I feel privileged to join projects that reach beyond borders, connecting cultural contexts and artistic practices. In these types of projects, I generally experience a higher degree of mixture of writing styles, of art styles and of themes, and that encourages me to explore and experiment. 

    I don’t have any doubt about representing Denmark, and I do feel Danish in my response to many things, especially when I was living in France. Even when I’m not intending to, people view my work as Scandavian, perhaps because it deals with psychological issues and I often bring a psychological perspective to my writing. I also like to be very concrete about the descriptions of places. In the text I used for my video, I do talk about specific places in Copenhagen. 

As I haven’t at the time of this interview seen the result of the entire project, it’s hard to describe how it feels to be a part of this Wordtrip, but I’m excited to see how it will all come together.

Photo by Michael Juhl Svendsen.

3. What does being part of a Europe-wide community of artists mean to you?

Being invited to do this project and generally participating in Paris Lit Up events, I don’t as much feel part of a Europe-wide community but rather part of a global community of artists. While living in Paris and through opportunities like these, I’ve met people from all over the world. 

I’ll also admit that I’ve never had a strong sense of European identity, which might be linked to the fact that I’ve never been outside of Europe. The times I’ve felt European have been when meeting people from outside the continent and hearing them describe certain things as being particularly European.  I’ve talked to some Americans who come to France because they think the social security system is great, but I wouldn’t agree. I moved to France because of dreams and adventure, and not at all for economic security. 

It’s different for me with Danish identity. I, for better and for worse, feel Danish on an everyday basis, maybe because I encountered elements in France that differed from what I’d grown up with. France is very rule governed and when someone orders me to do something I get quite angry and upset. Back in Denmark the response to the pandemic is much more peer controlled. There aren’t government papers or attestations, but people might tell each other off in the supermarket. 

On a linguistic level, I love the challenge that comes with being Danish and writing in Danish in an international community. Since living in Paris, I’ve gone from experiencing this as mostly an obstacle to now finding it enriching, choosing between translating my texts to English or using the original Danish version.

 I think you learn more about yourself and your cultural context by encountering what’s different, and I’m curious to see which insights might surface from the European Wordtrip.

Copenhagen. Photo by Yann Lorang.

4. Could you tell us a little about how the global pandemic affected your art and artistic practice?

I’ve always admired artists who could work well, and even feel artistically nourished, during uncertain times. Unfortunately I’m a bit of a control freak, and it’s very challenging for me to work in the current situation, having no idea what the future will bring and generally feeling on very unstable ground. The situation brings a lot of emotions that I try to note down and plan to transform into something worth showing others when I once again can find the sense of security that I need to write. 

Regarding our project for the European Wordtrip, it’s really been helpful to collaborate with Yann. Working with him has given me a framework, and we’ve since created other text-music compositions for our project, Blå Time. If you are interested, I invite you to follow our YouTube channel where we’ll soon upload more of our videos. You can also contact us at  Blaa.time.contact@gmail.com if you’d like to learn more.

Thumbnail/cover Photo by Sofie Melin.