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What else do you do with a strange word, but take it into your mouth, so that you can send it out again, having tasted its strangeness even as you try to mould it to your own tongue, and at the same time let it reshape your tongue?
Peter Hutchings, Words Are Not Hard, catalogue essay, Casula Powerhouse, 2006
Language at the scale of bodies
The body rarely leaves the house in the art of Eugenia Raskopoulos. In her latest work, Diglossia, the body is glimpsed through transparent streaks on a steamed up mirror: the body is still housed, intimately, within a domestic scale.1 In the tradition of women performing the body, Raskopoulos stays close to home, and with the nothing of those marks in steam (and nothing on) begins a process towards communication with simple signs, the barest support of language.
Call it a deep domesticity that cuts through to the core of language, language is always supported by a core of a body; the body is the house through which language is activated and without which language would be as lost as forgotten ciphers on ancient stone.
It is as if Raskopoulos has just stepped out of the shower and begun the familiar gesture of rubbing the mirror to clear the steam when she is halted by a recognition. In those hasty marks there is language in all its paradoxes: language as the alien symbolic order separate from us and, yet, of us. Of course, language’s foreignness is only caught in such rare moments of attention. Seeing the body externalised in the same reflection as those marks of a proto-language accentuates how language comes... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline