Linguistic Synchronicities

ABSTRACT

Linguistic Synchronicities operates within the infinite and uncertain realm of creating words from languages arising out of different families, cartographic inscriptions, historical and socio-political contexts could elicit an epistemic abyss. In a way, in a manner this is a grand gesture of alluding to my melancholy correction of mastering a foreign tongue before my mother tongue as a consequence of multiple colonial epochs (from the Philippine experience that is).

From here, I’d like to perceive different languages transparent to each other, permeating each other fluidly, then plotting undefined terrains of possibilities of elsewheres. So, in brief, this work charts the deliberate and at times non-deliberate (to a point of innocence) mirroring languages and allowing them to interpenetrate each other with Tagalog, English, French, Spanish, Catalan, Hokkien, and Bahasa (and at other times Javanese).

This particular work developed from my sustained meditative practice that was prompted by the series of confinements here in Spain and my peculiar perspective as a Southeast Asian artist and the leanings of contemporary artistic practices rooted within the tropes of spirituality. And in my personal experience and challenges of finding spaces to interact or platforms to initiate dialogue and exchanges in Catalunya (where there appears to be an inherent lack of Asian voices in the cultural sphere), I started to go within and in return I’ve found a dynamic means of assimilating myself through a meditative act of mirroring languages, creating connections within familiar and dissonant trajectories. It also intimates a kind of linguistic synchronicity that enables us to create a spectrality of pluralities even within these times of intense isolation.

KEY WORDS

Linguistic Spectralities, Meditation, Transliguistic Interventions, Mediated Languages, Southeast Asian Cosmopolitanisms, Transcultural Exchange, Meditation as Performance, Experimental Linguistics

MODALITY

GRAPHIC PROPOSAL

SECTION

ART - TERRITORY

BIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE

(b. 1987) is a multidisciplinary Filipino artist whose practice is heavily rooted in photography and performance, and engaged with translation, history, architecture, ecology, cinema and HIV/AIDS activism. He was the first Southeast Asian participant in the Independent Studies Programme at MACBA, Barcelona. Artistic research residency, MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona - Centro de Estudios y Documentación (CED).