Palimpsest for Generation 1.5

When Y-Dang came to know my work, I had moved away from autobiographical writing and was reinventing myself in Cambodia, my birth country, when it was necessary to take residency outside of America. During this reinvention period, I decided not to make angry work that would mine my family and personal history for material. It was a period during which I wanted to feel free and more experimental in art-making. Making art in Cambodia brought Y-Dang into my life.

Years later, I was pulled to re-perform Palimpsest in Boston, but I didn’t initially know why. Sometimes, you go with your instincts in the hopes the answers reveal themselves later. Before my performance, I was introduced to a professor who taught Asian American studies at Brandeis University. She happened to be the adviser of a Cambodian American student. This professor, whom I had never met, brought up Y-Dang’s scholarship in our conversation. She said that she was just sharing the scholarship of a Cambodian Canadian scholar who worked with memory, literature, refugee studies, and resettlement in the Cambodian diaspora community. She said it was a scholar who had recently passed away. I said, “You mean Y-Dang Troeung? That’s my friend!”

Then it made sense to me. Y-Dang. I was re-performing this piece, the only piece in my entire repertoire that uses autobiographical text, for Y-Dang.

Inscriptions: The actual words written on my back, then wiped away, with the next text reinscribed

father school teacher
Nixon orders bombings
Climb coconut trees
Khmer Rouge regime
year zero
father mother secret dates
enlisted to pick up cow dung
3 years 8 months 20 days
father Abdullah born
Muslims targeted
brother lived for 7 days
mother Souraya born
90% artists killed
motorcycle scar
brother Mustafa born
no food. no breast milk
no exact birthdate. I am a fire sign.
nightmare of walking
family trip Refugee camps
family trip Chicago
family trip first home
family trip Malaysia
family trip Niagara Falls
family trip distant cousins
family trip Hawaii
home somewhere else
16-hour labor. Born a libra.
factory job $3.75/hr
grandfather soldier
no one left unmarked
no end in sight.
no choice but to leave
gutsy grandmother
house egged
Madonna, Michael Jackson, & Cindy Lauper rock my world
I witness her last breath
9/11 in my bathrobe
reunited after 10 years
father PTSD panic attacks.
return after 15 years
return after 25 years
return after 30 years
never returned
site of tourism & atrocities
sugar palm trees
Graceland chapel
married 60 years. died 61 days apart.
tribunals begin
First to graduate with $70K debt
we arrive with nothing but the clothes on our back

Fig. 1. Performance still of Anida Yoeu Ali’s durational re-performance of Palimpsest for Generation 1.5 at Brandeis University on April 2, 2024, assisted by Cambodian American student Veronica Vong.

Artwork Label

Anida Yoeu Ali

Palimpsest for Generation 1.5

Performance–Installation, 2024

Materials: 15 feet of hair, silkscreened cloth diapers, ink, cloth rag, wooden stool, white bowl, body of a genocide survivor, a live scribe.

Palimpsest for Generation 1.5 is a performance that includes inscriptions written on the artist’s back, which are then washed away. This act of writing, inscribing, and erasing is repeated over and over for up to two hours. The performance involves original text written by the performance artist, a local scribe, and a live audience to witness the act.

Anida Yoeu Ali is an artist, educator, and global agitator whose works span performance, installation, new media, public encounters, and political agitation. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual, and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity. Ali has performed and exhibited around the world including at the Palais de Tokyo, the Malay Heritage Centre, the Smithsonian, the Shangri-La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture and Design, the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and more.