The work extends Boedi Widjaja’s exploration of diaspora, transmission, and unstable histories through a permutational poem composed in response to his lived experience of migration. The poem — Rivers and Lakes / Tanah dan Air / Land and Water / Sungai Sejarah — consists of four lines reorganized into 24 variants, a structure echoing the mutability of DNA and the fragile architectures through which memory and belonging emerge, drift, and recombine. Installed alongside the moving-image is a molecular matrix of 96 petri dishes, each containing synthetic DNA encoding one line of the poem. Stacked into 24 columns corresponding to the poem’s permutations, the array spatializes the poem as a shifting molecular architecture of transmission and variation.

In the moving-image work, four synthetic DNA strands encoding the poem are suspended in solution, where they seek, bind, and self-assemble at the molecular level. Their encounters produce fleeting bioluminescent signals, momentarily illuminating the poem at the threshold of formation before dissolving again into flux. The molecular behaviour of the poem mirrors diasporic experience itself: identities formed through movement, rupture, and recombinatory processes of transmission. Rendering language as living matter, the work approaches history as an indeterminate material process — continuously written, unmade, and reassembled across bodies, generations, and time.

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