Islands of Remembering and Forgetting

DNA is often invoked as evidence of ancestry and origin. In *Islands of Remembering and Forgetting*, I use it to carry a poem shaped by migration. Four recombinant DNA strands encoding its verses drift through solution, seek one another and bind to form a sequence. Fleeting bioluminescent signals make their encounter visible. The poem, *Rivers and Lakes / Tanah dan Air / Land and Water / Sungai Sejarah*, has four lines expressed in English and Indonesian, with other languages hidden within them. Reordered into twenty-four variants, the lines form a matrix of possible readings. No single ordering settles the poem’s account of origin or belonging. The work unsettles the authority often given to DNA as a record of lineage: it carries verses that can be reordered, allowing migrant memory to resist a fixed account. The strands’ binding becomes visible through light, offering an image of repair in which dispersed histories can meet and be read anew.