DIALOGUE migrating words

Jani Ruscica

To: Diana Campbell
Thu, May 25, 2023, 3:49 PM

Hi Diana,
Here some questions to get us started : )

How does language embody?
Can ambiguity and specificity coexist and how?
How to challenge and destabilize categories and binaries?

These are recurring questions within my practice.
My artistic endeavors are fueled by a constant need to traverse various imaginary or constructed boundaries to create doubt or uncertainty. To me, doubt and uncertainty seem to be the most fertile grounds for starting to form a relationship with any artwork.

In thinking through ideas of migratory language, or migratory words and their agility, elasticity and ability to traverse various thresholds and contain multitudes, the 6th edition of the Dhaka Art Summit you curated taps into some kind of sense(s) of uncertainty too. In your introduction to বন্যা/Bonna you describe the ways of migratory words/language:

“Storms have eyes and eyes have storms. We can be flooded
with emotions, yet reduced to singular drops of tears. We give storms human names; we describe human emotions using terms that are also applied to weather.”

What role does language play in your attempts to traverse boundaries; making words migrate and potentially, both muddle various fabricated, rigid categories or, on the other hand, stretch out to form new, unexpected connections?

বন্যা/Bonna certainly holds on to her plurality, both her specificities and her ambiguity, which deeply resonates with a Glissantian claim for the right to opacity and his arguments against transparency or societal demands of being legible across cultural lines.

“To consent not to be a single being.” Jani

Diana Campbell

To: Jani Ruscica
Wed, Jun 28, 2023, 12:29 AM

Dear Jani,

Sorry for the snail pace, but I am happy to get this over to you and
to take this further on in person when I see you in Delhi in a few days!

xx D

How does language embody?

Amitav Ghosh’s adaptation of the Bengali myth of Bon Bibbi, ‘Jungle Nama’, which featured alongside your work in ‘Very Small Feelings’, speaks to the power of language: of the sounds of rhyming verse, of the rhythm, the diction, the phonetic, in having the power to incant something, to incant a state change. I definitely feel that; when I left Bangladesh after the Dhaka Art Summit I flew to California via Guam (with many stops on the way) where my maternal family is from.

I went to the Guam Museum and watched a film about our origin myths and it was in Chamorro, our native language which is going extinct. I mostly did not understand what was being said, but I cried, deeply, uncontrollably, because of how my body reacted to the sound. That language is embodied in my tears, and the tears of many others. Michael Bevacqua from the Guam Museum was at DAS, and spoke about how his grandmother cried when she heard him speaking Chamorro to his child, because she thought she would never hear that kind of language – that tender language between parent and child – in Chamorro again due to imperial attempts to kill the language.

I also think we can be different people in different languages. I am softest in Spanish, because I lack the vocabulary for competition and primarily have vocabulary related to feelings. I have the vocabulary to describe how I am feeling, rather than what I am doing or what I am thinking.

What do you think about this, Jani?

Can ambiguity and specificity coexist and how?

Yes, also through language. Some words are so specific to one language that when they are translated, they become ambiguous. Ambiguity opens up space for interpretation, and a space for inbetweenness and understanding and creativity. This can be specific to me, ambiguous for you, and we can bond by filling the space in between these with dialogue. I also agree with Edouard Glissant’s positing of the right to opacity – not everything specific needs to be shared.

What a beautiful way of formulating a question, Jani! I think right now, my practice is trying to put forward a plurality of visual languages, as well as oral and written language, to try to challenge a singular view of how we see culture. The word Biennale carries a certain set of expectations with it, which are tied to European and American views of what it means to celebrate culture. There are many other ways of celebrating culture that are not called Biennales, which are perhaps specific to a certain context and therefore are likely to be mistranslated or perhaps not recognized by audiences who are looking for a biennale to tell them what contemporary visual culture is. We used to say that Dhaka Art Summit welcomes people who are first time art going visitors. This is true on one register, but are they experiencing art in other ways? There are traveling village theatre traditions called Jatra, and other forms of sharing culture with publics. We are trying to research these, and to use these forms as the basis to create new contemporary art and culture discourse rooted in more traditional and therefore accessible ways of engaging with culture. White cube boxes are alienating, boring, and not responsible. Art is not created in this way in most of the global south. This does not mean that I am against museums preserving works for posterity in climate control – of course museums need this – but we are not a museum, not trying to replicate a museum, and are trying to be a space of doing and making and sharing where works go onwards on a journey, rather than a repository for what is already tried true and tested.

I also think there is so much potential in misunderstanding, so I like to look for words that trip people up. Words that you think you understand, but might not, or words whose initial meanings get forgotten, and whose concepts can become more complex when you start to look at etymology. The name Srihatta, for example – our future art center in Northeast Bangladesh – came from studying the etymology of the word Sylhet: a place that most Bangladeshis think they understand. Srihatta’s name is an homage to the multiple layers of history that have shaped this rich landscape; it is the ancient Indo-Aryan term for Sylhet. In this area once there was an abundance of rocks known as ‘shila’. The ‘hat’ (bazaar) sat on top of these rocks. The name of Sylhet was derived from the words ‘Shila’ and ‘Hat’ as Shila-Hat, to form Shilhatta. The last Hindu King Raja Gour Govinda kept large stones for protection at the entrance of his capital Shilhatta, whose name was transformed over time into Srihatta, with ‘sri’ meaning, beauty, charm and wealth. The early 14th century brought the beginnings of Islamic culture and rule to Sylhet via the Middle Eastern Sufi mystic Hazrat Shahjalal and his 313 companions. On his arrival to the capital, it is said that Hazrat Shahjalal commanded the rocks to move away by uttering the term ‘Shill Hot’ – move away, stones), and local legend has it that the rocks moved to usher in a new era and the name Silhet came into existence. During the British colonial rule over the region, the word Sylhet was introduced to make ‘Silhet’ sound distinct from ‘Silchar’ (a town in Assam).

When I first brought up the idea of using Srihatta as the name for the Samdani Art Center and Sculpture Park, colleagues warned that this could not be done because it is a Hindu name in a Muslim majority conservative area. But after thinking about it, everyone got excited about how that word opened up so many stories, and was a way to understand that old words get hidden in new ones, and old worlds also get hidden in new ones. Sometimes they hide to be able to survive into the future. I think there are a lot of words and worlds hiding in your playful forms, Jani. It was such a pleasure to watch them unfold in Dhaka and soon again in Delhi.

Jani Ruscica

To: Diana Campbell
Wed, Sept 13, 2023, 2:59 PM

Dear Diana,

This year I arrive on June 6, - in fact the following day since it is past midnight.

They stop me at the customs, - because I provoke the guard
who asks me where I come from. In the arrivals hall

I’m puffing and panting - and growing taller and wider with anger.

As I travel from one city to the next I soften, - and the landscape is
a wild wavy line.

But now I speak a language with expressions and gestures - that I didn’t remember knowing. Something long forgotten comes to surface.

I punch a malicious fist
to massage my open palm. Jakaara fiike, ta ́ e u muute, - let the nuisance rip you up and kill you.

I start with a quote from my film ‘Scene Shifts, in six movements’, from 2011. This is a text I specifically commissioned for the film, a shared experience that I lacked the vocabulary or poetic imagination to describe myself. It’s by Finnish-Syrian-Romanian Maryam Hamadon, only 17 years old at the time, yet so poignantly articulating the experience of being between cultures, existing between languages and the shifts and changes that occur when moving across these different forms of embodied experience. Language, after all, shapes things and yet language is always so much more than mere words. The encounter you describe in Guam, with the origin myths in Chamorro is really moving, and the idea that language (even one we are unable to speak) is so deeply rooted in our experience of place rings so true. These languages resonate beyond reason; there is an instinctual and surely more directly emotional attachment and understanding of them. And of course, this sensibility becomes even more heightened when talking of a language at the verge of extinction, fragile and resilient in the face of harmful power relations and histories.

You make such an important point on how limited our understanding of contemporary visual culture often is, its parameters and contexts are far too strict, particularly in Europe and North America. Yet, I don’t think the question of valuing more vernacular art forms that are embedded in daily life and culture necessarily applies exclusively to the global south. To me there also seems to be a question of “class” or “center vs periphery” in the equation, that seems to cut across all cultures, don’t you think? And this of course extends to broader issues of access, education, or other means and exposure to canonical notions of what art or contemporary visual culture more broadly is. Inevitably complex questions of value and taste seem to come to the fore as well. When thinking of what influences us, as practitioners in the context of contemporary art, I always find it fascinating when vernacular forms are recognized as having foundational influence and importance, because they so often
do! Particularly for artists like myself, who come from peripheral or provincial/regional contexts and working-class backgrounds. Whether it is engaging with traditional puppetry and other forms of decorative arts in my childhood’s paternal Sicily, to Tala Madani spending her early childhood drawing whilst lying on Persian rugs in Teheran, to Ruth Asawa learning the use of wire through practical work in her family’s farm in Norwalk. Regardless of backgrounds and contexts, these things can hugely impact our understanding of visual and material cultures and shape our vocabularies. They are indeed foundational to our making, but also to the way we relate to this thing we call contemporary art or what we value as contemporary visual culture as a whole.

Etymology!
It’s such a journey to trace back the meaning of words. How eye opening, always, from the most banal and mundane of words. It really puts things in perspective, reveals entire histories, also forgotten ones, systems of power, and simply highlights the layered and complex nature of all things. I love how you describe working with misunderstandings, tripping up only to start unravelling something meaningful. It certainly challenges binaries and notions of fixity. Nothing is still, language is relational and in constant motion. Etymology should be taught at school, it should be its own subject, it would probably singlehandedly eradicate the biggest shortcoming of our times, ahistoricity. We certainly need to change everything, entire systems, but not everything needs to be reinvented. There is a lot of wisdom and knowledge that has just been forgotten or sidelined, I think we simply need to be more aware of how layered everything is, of causes and effects, and etymology can be really helpful. I’m in awe of how in the ‘Democracy of the Species’ Robin Wall Kimmerer traces the complexity of her native Potawatomi language; its particularities, its priorities and quite simply what kind of worldview it promotes or facilitates. It certainly doesn’t strike me as a language that is based on binarisms. Apparently 70% of the language is made of verbs, everything is alive in other words. A bay is not a bay; a thing, an object, contained through its naming. It is active, it is ‘being a bay’. It is being relational, living, connected to everything. What kind of world does this kind of language create, amazing, right? I think it also acknowledges the plurality we have already mentioned. Kimmerer says: “A bay is a noun only if water is dead”. The bay could turn into a stream, an ocean or a waterfall, but for the time being the bay has decided to shelter itself between some particular shores and to be a bay.

Do you know of any particularities like this in Chamorro?

I think these processes of naming, unnaming or misnaming even, and their implicit politics have always been front and center in my practice, the focus has certainly shifted over the years, but the core has always remained the same. And I would be lying if I claimed that my own subjective experience of always being besides or in between definitions, unnamable somehow, wouldn’t have affected this persistent inquiry.

“Language is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer

Jani
P.S. Congratulations on the Mendes Wood show, it looks amazing!

Diana Campbell

To: Jani Ruscica
Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 8:27 PM

Dear Jani,

I apologize for this long lapse in writing back to you. I feel like this year has pulled me to the extremes of straddling the widest possible geographic and time differences and I’m in the process of standing still and settling back into myself. I write to you on the back of a month-long trip across Bangladesh and Argentina – where a lot of these ideas you put on the page in your previous letter were very resonant. I was very moved by the words of Elvira Espejo who is the Director of the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz, Bolivia and is also a weaver, storyteller, poet and artist, and speaks Aymara and Quechua. She spoke in Buenos Aires about how in many cultures, such as hers, there was no “writing” as we know it or as we correspond right now; history and stories were recorded through ceramics, weaving, murals, etc. One of the highlights of my year was going on vacation in North Peru to see ancient Moche sites – where history was also “written” in ceramics, textiles, and murals. In a way, it’s a much more generous way to connect to the past in this visual way, where we can recognize how people lived and what their worlds looked like through more tactile forms than letters strung together into words. Some of the murals in the ancient mud city of Chan Chan depicting sea lions reminded me of your work for very small feelings, actually.

Speaking of language and boundaries of knowing, in an interview for MoMA’s website, Elvira shared, “The Eurocentric perspective asserts that reason resolves everything. But those of us coming

from practice resolve [artistic] problems not only with our head but with our hands and eyes. If the hands and eyes do not have a clear sense of the design, do you think that reason can execute it? That’s why there exist words like maquiraicu, or “thanks to my hands,” in Quechua. Taking these linguistic nuances into account generates another epistemological position – a Latin American philosophical position.” I love this description of a mind and body connection with the world necessary to create something. I feel like we are becoming more and more disembodied, or at least I am when tied to a computer and a screen and a chair, and I hope to get more and more out of this zone in 2024 and more into “my hands” somehow and to engage with “hand-based” knowledge systems more.

I was writing to my mother and my brother about your questions about Chamorro, and there wasn’t a clear answer, but when it comes to naming and renaming and mistranslation, they both reminded me of the Chamorro word for refrigerator which reflects that society’s encounter with foreign technologies or concepts. He emailed me that “The word for refrigerator (“kåhon ais”), comes to mind—Kåhon (box) comes immediately from Spanish, “ais” comes immediately from English, and of course both of those words (Cajon in Spanish, Ice in English), share etymological roots across other European languages. This sort of thing is pretty easy to find in a lot of languages in the age of globalization (e.g., I understand that in Korean, the word for cell phone is “haen-deu-pon,” a linguistic corruption of two English words: “hand” and “phone”). Cahon Ais is interesting to me because it reflects the transition time between two different world orders in which the development of the technology itself (industrial ice production) maps onto the transition from one colonial context to the next. The other and less obvious way I’ve encountered it
is in the seemingly universal concepts for which there is no known indigenous word—only words borrowed from other languages. One example that comes up from time to time is the purported absence of an indigenous word for “poor” (the Chamorro word is poble, borrowed from the Spanish “pobre”), despite the existence of an indigenous word for “rich”—”gefsaga.” The political implications of this are powerful...”

This also reminds me of a quote by the Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam about poverty which I often use when describing the context of the Dhaka Art Summit. “In the 2,000 years of our history, we have only been poor for 250 years, and that too because of colonization. If we do suffer from poverty, we suffer only from one kind of poverty—economic poverty. But most countries suffer from other kinds of poverty, even today.” I think of our exchange and our existence as one of abundance, where we bring new worlds into being through exchanges such as these. They are very precious to me, and I hope that we have opportunities for more of these kinds of exchanges, which exceed the capacity for words, in the coming years.

Jani Ruscica

To: Diana Campbell
Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 3:43 PM

Dear Diana,

I start with an apology, I’m so sorry it has taken me so long to reply.
I must also guiltily admit that the overall leisurely pace of our correspondence so far does feel quite nice, it is very rare these days to be able to engage in something so unhurriedly.

You make such an important point in relation to language(s), that there are indeed various forms of languages, and we ourselves work with ones that are predominantly visual or non-verbal, to which written or spoken languages are mere add-ons, quite literally simple (or at times complicated!) attempts to attach chains of words onto them. And yet the very nature of visual languages is to be beyond

or always partly out of reach of the spoken/written ones. I’m sure this is the very reason why I (and many other visual artists) have chosen to make art in the first place. As someone bilingual and bicultural, I always felt language was very volatile and deeply relational, whereas art could seemingly express something more open ended, with no pretense of specificity, or could even repel any claims to specificity. Alternatively it also had the potential to activate another kind of specificity, that simply couldn’t be grasped with language. For these very reasons, it meant freedom too. Freedom to make something beyond the reach or capture of language.

So much knowledge, information and history are stored and recorded in visual languages; in the murals, weavings and ceramics you mention. Or in recipes, dances, rituals, healing practices etc. partly noted or totally unwritten even, merely in the ways of making, doing something, whatever it is, in the body, in the hands as Elvira Espejo put it. The Eurocentric, and may I add patriarchal perspective, not only asserts reason and written knowledge as superior, but also forms of making that are predominantly male as more important.

I feel we have to chip away at these givens, simply reshape and reorder things. Not unlike Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ in which she so aptly asserts the significance of all kinds of containers (not least the womb), as having been of primary importance for the survival of the human species, rather than the spears and other weapons used for hunting or war that we have been told to have been so foundational for survival and “evolution”.

I have started working on a project which is specifically related to making as a form of thinking (again much art is a form of thinking with the hands, thinking or shaping through making, rather than a rational process of idea followed by execution). I guess the amount of language we retrospectively attach to our visual languages makes one sometimes believe otherwise. I’m working in ways and with materials I have no mastery of, I really want the materials to ostensibly hold on to their own will and material behavior. To push against my wishes, to really cherish the boundlessness non-mastery has to offer. Again, I guess material always does this, pushes against, but we learn our ways to control and contain it. As a high school student I studied applied art, so I’ve had a go at pretty much every possible crafts technique there is; from felting to porcelain, enamel and silk painting, from batik dying to metal, wood, leather work and ceramics. I never mastered any of these techniques in ways a crafts professional would do. Yet, by merely having a go at them, I could feel how much material history and knowledge they could hold. I’m interested in making objects that are meant to be used, are functional, that become active through their interaction with the body, and specifically through the sounds they make.

So besides a form, they have to have a voice too, thus it is essential to eventually hand these objects over to performers, to have them activated, to ward off any sense of fixity and subject them to endless subjectivities and processes of interpretation, even “incorporation”.

I’m attaching a few images of sketches I have made using language prompts with image generators. These have been mere visual sketches or propositions of hybrid objects, mere aids for getting started in my aforementioned material tests in non-mastery ; ) Besides material qualities I’m hoping these objects embody some kind of futurity as well. So, alongside material properties, I used in the language prompts allusions to sci-fi literature, to feminist and transfeminist utopias, merely as a way to quite literally, through language, insert a sense/promise of futurity and utopianism that

I need these objects to embody. In any case, as I’m working on them, as materials push against me, have their own ways, I can see how these objects start to speak for themselves, and in ways and of things I was entirely unaware of as well. As much as they materially contain or embody, they also have no precedent, they remain unnameable as objects and thus hopefully hold on to their perpetual and unburdened potentiality. So... much like the murals, print works and videos I have been working with, I’m hoping these objects too to usher processes of naming into crisis, and to joyfully and playfully embody a similar kind of shapeshifting hybridity, animacy and elasticity.

Within your own curatorial practice, how do you see engaging more with “hand based” knowledge systems could manifest itself? How to activate that mind-body connection in practices that are all too often defined by predominantly language-based, theoretical or intellectual contextualizations?

Jani

Diana Campbell

To: Jani Ruscica
Tue, Dec 10, 2024, 1:58 PM

Dear Jani,

It is my time to apologize now; this year has slipped away from me amidst a very intense travel schedule, which makes it hard to properly compile thoughts in a letter format in a time when I am short-format immediate texting all the time. It’s a pleasure to sit down quietly, NTS radio in the background, and respond to you.

I embarked on a crazy new adventure this year to curate the inaugural edition of the Bukhara Biennial in Uzbekistan, taking a thematic frame where artists and artisans would be collaborating on making new works and both collaborators would be named. This is a reaction to an incident I encountered in Dhaka Art Summit 2020, where some senior artists (who I will not name) from Bangladesh refused to show their work in the proximity of a large mural by “cinema banner painters.” These not-named-here artists are named in the Bangladeshi art world, but the “cinema banner painters” were nameless, only described by what they make, not by who they are. There is a problem with the language with how we describe art, and artists, and I want to try to combat this in Uzbekistan. Interestingly, there isn’t such a hierarchy in how painters and embroiderers are seen and described in conversations that I have about art in Uzbekistan as I have experienced in other parts of the world like Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, and many other contexts where I have worked.

Back to your question of language and “hand-based-knowledge- systems,” I have been thinking a lot recently about how hand-based- languages have migrated around the world, and how we don’t think about them in the same way we think about verbal or written forms of languages. People talk a lot about Genghis Khan in Bukhara, pointing out the only buildings he spared in the city – one because it was buried under mud and he and his army did not see it, the other because it was so magnificent that he decided to let it be. I asked ChatGPT about the story. I am told that “Genghis Khan spared artisans.” Here is what it told me:

“Yes, Genghis Khan was known to spare artisans, craftsmen, scholars, and engineers during his military campaigns. This practice was part of his broader strategy to enrich his empire with skilled individuals who could contribute to its infrastructure, administration, and technological advancements.

The Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan valued expertise and practical skills. Artisans and craftsmen were often relocated to serve the empire by building fortifications, producing weapons, creating art, or advancing knowledge. This policy not only boosted the empire’s resources but also facilitated cultural and technological exchange across its vast territories.

Genghis Khan’s pragmatic approach to talent ensured the integration of diverse skills and traditions into the Mongol Empire, making it one of the most formidable and innovative empires of its time.”

Artisans were moved around as empires formed across history, and those hand-based knowledges impacted the visual culture of places far from home. The Mughal empire in India, which I know well from the years I spent living there, was founded by Babur who is from what is now Uzbekistan. He took artisans with him eastward, and now that I know this, I can see clear links between what I am experiencing in Uzbekistan and what I recognize from India. And with time and distance (encountering new climates and materials) – these hand-based knowledges change and become distinct from where they came from.

I encountered a beautiful saying/tenet in a Sufi shrine in Bukhara – which comes from the Naqshbandi school of Sufism. Dil Ba Yor Dast Ba Kor – or “heart with god and hands at work.” Making is a way to build that connection with the divine, and I think that is part of the reason why we see such beautiful hand-made works in places such as Bukhara which have a Sufi connection. In this tradition, you live for now, because you do not know if the next moment will come. So, you devote yourself to the now with the gifts you have in order to connect to an idea of god. I like this form of thinking very much.

Thank you so much for showing me these new works which have literally jumped off the wall and the page (the formats of the works you showed in Dhaka and in New Delhi) to come into three- dimensional form. How did you feel when making these works?

I like that hand-knowledge often holds with it knowledge that others wanted to erase – so hidden meaning within patterns found in the objects, or power that can be retained in ritual use of the object when people might even forget why the ritual started. I can imagine you starting new rituals with these objects as you hand them over for people to use. Can you imagine that the Bengali new year ritual of a colorful procession with papier-mâché sculptures called Mangal Shobhajatra is younger than I am? Invited by artists in 1986 or something like that, and now has UNESCO intangible heritage status?! This gives me hope that we too as arts professionals can create new rituals that bring people joy and a sense of meaning and belonging – and perhaps this new turn in your work is heading in that direction.

Sending you lots of love for the holiday season! Diana