POLITIKANT//DARWIN VISUAL ARTS//26.06.2020
We Can All Speak in Tongues is a performance and moving-image work developed through glossolalia: speech that sounds linguistic but resists semantic translation. Drawing from the Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues, the work approaches language at the edge of sense, where voice, body, rhythm, belief, and inscription converge.
The performance treats glossolalia not simply as religious expression, but as a textual phenomenon. It is language before, beside, or beyond the letter: embodied, sounded, repeated, and difficult to stabilise.
Documentation
Video/audio/performance.
Research Relation
This work extends the project’s concern with writing before the letter. It asks what counts as text when speech refuses ordinary semantic legibility, and how the body performs language prior to its capture by meaning.
Within Meeting the Text Halfway, glossolalia becomes a method for approaching the instability of text itself: not as a closed container of meaning, but as a surface of address, desire, rhythm, and reception.
QR Relation
Section: Part II: Praxis
Chapter: WE CAN ALL SPEAK IN TONGUES
Page: 142
Return to the document: This page provides access to the moving-image and/or audio documentation of the work.