Word turner 02

A Conversation That Never Happened

Much of my sound work revolves around creating speculative, unlikely meetings. I use interviews, conversations, field recordings, and procedural sound as my building blocks. I have a particular interest in the immigrant community’s relationship with language, as well as the local community’s relationship with minority or indigenous languages. This interest is driven by a desire to explore both the internal (individual) and interpersonal (society-wide) dynamics between dominant and non-dominant languages. Through various linguistic sound projects, I aim to capture the elusive characteristics that languages lend to their speakers. What do languages mean to us?

For Word Turner 02 project, I interviewed people from different linguistic minorities living in Glasgow: a French-speaking first-generation immigrant, an Urdu-speaking second-generation British-Pakistani individual, a first-generation Arabic-speaking person, and a Scots-speaking Scottish person. I asked them the same questions about belonging and identity, discussing memories related to language, and singing happy birthday songs.

These conversations, conducted individually in our majority non-dominant language—English—were later reflected upon and recorded by the participants in their respective languages. These recordings were then segmented thematically and played through four speakers attached to a circular steel disc sculpture resembling a tabletop. The resulting sound work is a speculative conversation about language, belonging, and the politics of placemaking that they could have had if not for the language barrier.

***

Word Turner 02 was shown in Studio Pavilion (2022) curated by Laura Plant and KIOSK curated by Jamie Dyer, funded by Creative Scotland.