SERI(A) 2: SILK IS A NOUN

SERI(a) is the State Silk Museum's series of eponymous publications, presenting scientific work alongside collaborations with artists. It serves as an archive for some of the most diverse documents on sericulture.

In "Silk, the Universe, Language, the Heart," Inger Christensen develops her poetics, drawing on a text by the Chinese poet, general, and politician Lu Ji (261–303), who was an important influence not only on her but also on numerous other 20th-century poets.

In his text "Wen fu", Lu Ji presents his reflections on the art of writing in the form of a lyrical text, demonstrating that poetry is above all a medium of "emerging" (Stephen Olson), not a representation of the existing world. In this sense, the significance of silk and its production by silkworms in Christensen's text goes beyond mere metaphor.

Complemented by laboratory photographs of the life cycle of a silkworm, the two texts are juxtaposed in this publication in a unique way.