In 2016, Vietnamese American artist Aimée Lê premiered ‘Aliki in Saigon’, a multilingual non-fluent ‘translation’ of the songs of Greek 60s pop movie diva Aliki Vougiouklaki, which was later released as an EP by queer music label Fytini. https://fytini.bandcamp.com/album/aliki-in-saigon. Originally positing that Aliki’s work had been “big in Vietnam” as a spoof for a Greek audience, the project nevertheless began to draw together internationalist threads and explore the potential of emotional expressivity through and beyond language. Using the original melodies and lyrics to create surreal pop ‘doubles’ through fragmented Vietnamese, French, English and Russian, Aimée’s journey in Aliki’s wonderland stumbles upon the impossibility of translation and hence it becomes a monument of human communication whose history is no more than a repetitive exercise in misunderstanding. Join us for a small performance and retrospective of the work.