Larissa Min

Larissa Min received 2013 GAP Award funding to assist with attaining the skills and tools to build a website sharing a “multi”-media narrative of text, images, sound, and videos of Antarctica, which will be an expansion of Wondering Godwana. Wondering Godwana combines a narrative of Antarctica with one of a fictional girl living in poverty in Amazonia as a way to examine issues of development, global climate change, conservation, and social justice, drawing the connections between seemingly separate but delicately poised, interconnected systems. Larissa’s larger creative goal is to bring together disparate realities from across a wide geographic and cultural landscape and integrate them in a tapestry that reflects the totality of these experiences. She hopes to carve a syncretic voice via writing and utilize multiple mediums to capture complex realities in the best way possible.

Larissa received 2010 GAP Award funding to take time to complete her work Breaking English, a creative non-fictional account of her family’s migration from Korea to Brazil and later to the U.S. Breaking English is a lens through which to examine the experiences of immigration, displacement, and remembering. Through image and word it raises questions of identity, loss, home, fact, and fiction, and how these combine in the process of remembrance. In its narrative structure, this piece highlights the use of language and invention as we seek ways to weave fragments of memories into a coherent story. This is her first attempt at a book-length work, as well as writing autobiographically to reflect the experience of displacement, and as such this is a critical step in her artistic and professional development.