The hybrid linguistic gene pool of Brussels creates good conditions for citizens to perform language sensitivities on a daily basis without having to stay within conventional uses of language.
To build bridges to languages that we don’t necessarily master ourselves, we instrumentalise many things amongst which our bodies, cultural religious political convictions and origins, social awareness and other forms of lives experiences.
Parlez-vous Saint Gillois? (Do you speak Saint-Gillois?) and De Schaarbeekse Taal (The language of Schaarbeek) are two projects organised by the associaition for arts and media Constant between 2009 and 2015. They aimed to create audio portraits of the Brussels neighborhoods Saint-Gilles and Schaarbeek through setting up databases with extra-ordinary words. Neologisms, hybrid- and cross over words that are symptomatic for language diverse urban contexts were collected through recorded conversations, interviews, organised events and radio broadcasts.
These two projects are the starting point for the speculative artistic research that Peter Westenberg caries out during this residency period. Can speaker, listener and language discard of their mutual hierarchies? How can polyglotism create spaces for the unheard and the marginal in a context of a super-diverse society? Peter Westenberg artistically deploys language spaces by experimenting with disorientation, impurity, disruption, socio-political codes and resonance.
The residency results in a performative lecture in which phonologica-l, science-fiction-, socio-linguistic- and urbanist elements will enter into dialogue with the words from Parlez-vous Saint-Gillois? and La Langue Schaerbeekoise.
www.videomagazijn.org
www.constantvzw.org
www.deschaarbeeksetaal.be
www.parlezvous1060.be