The Future We Speak
Detail from Giulia Mangoni's painting
The Future We Speak
Curator: Eugenia Delfini
Artists: Francisca Benítez, Adele Dipasquale, Giovanni Giaretta, Cristina Gozzini / Mario Nicolás Ramirez / Rebeca Pak / Tianrou Wu, Laura Llaneli, Giulia Mangoni, Nicoline Van Harskamp.
Dates: March 17th - April 15th, 2023
Opening Reception: March 17th: 6 - 8pm
Gallery: LES Gallery at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center
THE FUTURE WE SPEAK is a group exhibition which attempts to investigate language as a living system and envision a world as not dominated by a unique linguistic system. The dominance of a language only produces inequalities, disparities and doesn’t encourage international understanding since it depends on the concept of territory, ethnicity, and boundary. How to foster linguistic freedom and diversity? What are we willing to give up for a truly multilingual world? How to build new collective grammars?
The international artists selected for THE FUTURE WE SPEAK address language as “a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance or expressing love” (cit. Toni Morrison). They present linguistic inventions and junctures, tongue contaminations, polylingual positions and linguistic systems that resist translatability. In the exhibition, installations, videos, and photos feature a generative word work activities and question how to transform our auditory and verbal sensibilities by embodying other words, sounds and signs belonging to the multilingual world we live in including non-written form of interactions, languages based on signs and mimicry, and even nonsense exchanges.
By advancing new linguistic propositions that try to subvert, trouble, and undo the fixity of language, the exhibited works look for alternatives to linguistic dominance and reject any forms of linguistic imperialism which reduces identities to one nation and one culture.
THE FUTURE WE SPEAK is thus, the occasion not only to engage with language as a complex, unstable and self-organized living system but also to imagine the future we speak by suggesting that the acts of listening, languaging, and signing can empower us and who is around us if understood as an open-ended set of meanings made by forked tongues, hands on fire, untranslatable words, and distorted English.
Project supported by the Italian Council (11th edition, 2022), the program aimed at supporting Italian contemporary art in the world promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity within the Italian Ministry of Culture.
