Two Belgrade musicians listen and interpret the pop hit ‘Shout’ by Tears for Tears, without understanding a single word. They try to grasp the text by means of mimesis. “If meaning is not conveyed through this music, then the music presents itself. Sounds uttered by the two men in Shoum seem familiar as words, and this estrangement of words makes language become music. The notion of knowing something – language, is displaced here by the notion of relating to something – sound.” (KZ)

‘Backslang’, a coded form of English which is mostly used by the British working classes in major cities, was developed as a linguistic disguise to protect speakers, especially from the ears of the law. A well-known example is that of Curtis “Cocky” Warren, a notorious Liverpudlian drug baron, who was arrested in the 1990s after the police finally managed to decipher his phone conversations. Backslang shapes a secret space and, like all languages, a space for identification. In this sense, Backslang shouldn’t be understood only as an expression of social and economical conditions, but as a form of resistance.

A language class in the dark. Three children in Joal, Senegal, repeat a series of words in Wolof. While they get a taste of the texture and the musicality of the language, a constellation of colour and nuance unfolds. “All the words that I had chosen to be spoken by the Wolof kids have got to do to a some extent with colonization. Wolof has words for different shades of darkness which go from white, via grey, and pale, and darker, not so black , to black and pitch black (that tell a lot about the differences, prejudices, casts and hierarchy in their society). And yet they’ve lost the words for red, yellow, blue and use the French ‘rouge’, ‘jaune’ and ‘bleu’ instead. How can such a rich language have no word for the main colors, while being so sensitive to color at the same time?” (AS)

In 1931 Russian psychologist Alexander Romanovitch Luria travelled to Uzbekistan to interview the cotton farmers there. The purpose of his study was to test the results of the education programme put into place a few years before by the Soviet authorities in order to spread the principles of Socialism. In these videos, fragments of these interviews are combined with digital animations based on the photographs of Max Person, who portrayed the every-day life of 1930’s Uzbekistan. The result, both revealing and humorous, powerfully illustrates the role of language in an indoctrinating effort to transform a culture in the name of education and modernisation.

This video is part of a series of portraits of aphasia patients filmed during their logopedic therapy. Aphasia is an illness that affects the language centres of the brain, causing the partial or total loss of the ability to communicate verbally. “The confrontation with aphasic patients made me understand how speech is not an obvious fact. Normally speaking people generally don’t stop to think about the words and ideas that come out of their mouths. But aphasic people often fail to go beyond the first letter of the first word of the idea they want to express”. (SA)