Alicia Escot & Heidi Quante: The Bureau of Linguistical Reality

2nd Floor Gallery

August 10, 2020-February, 2021

Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it’s hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts? Lera Boroditsky, Asst Professor Psychology, Neuroscience, and Symbolic Systems, Stanford University

How do we describe the combination of pleasure and anxiety we feel in donning summer clothes in the middle of winter? Or basking in the exquisite spectacle of a sunset made vivid by wildfires? Inspired by such moments when they found themselves at a loss for words to describe emotions or ideas, Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott created The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a participatory art project to develop neologisms for our rapidly changing world. Rather than cede the power to create that language to “experts,” the Bureau creates spaces for conversation about the collective grief of living with climate change by setting up their field station in various sites—nationally and internationally—to invite us all to the table, creating new language that Quante and Escott understand to be connective anchors to advance dialogue and culture.

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For most people, thought and language are inextricably linked: language shapes thought. For instance, representations as diverse as time, number, kinship, emotion, and even musical pitch are shaped in part by how one thinks of—and describes—spatial relations. Linguistic thinking allows us to bring those thoughts— which may themselves sometimes be visual or emotional—into conscious awareness. Language also helps us codify experience and engage in dialogue with others.

In New Orleans, for example, nestled in the crescent of the Mississippi River, locals orient themselves by Lake Pontchartrain, which borders one edge of the city, and the river, which cups it in its bowl. If you’re looking for a particular address, it’s either lake side or river side, Uptown or Downtown, but never, ever, north, south, east, or west. Understanding this can be extremely vexing to visitors, because neither the river nor the lake is ever visible from any ground level vantage point in the city. Conversely, at the western edge of Cape York in Australia, the Kuuk Thaayorre privilege cardinal over relative directions. Rather than saying, “Move that cup over to the right a little,” they might say, “Move the cup north northwest.” These conceptions and descriptions of spatial relations both reflect—and result in—a distinct sense of oneself in the physical world. In this time of hastening change and its attendant anxieties, The Bureau invites us to delve into language, together creating an armature for exploring meaning and deepening our shared understanding.

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While conceptualizing this exhibition, the artists facilitated an online process for a group of CIIS faculty and staff to add a neologism to the Bureau’s dictionary. The word we created is Nauselixir, a healing nausea, as when a global illness reveals systemic toxicities and oppressions; the gut-level relief induced by individual and collective acts of purgative resistance.

Deirdre Visser and Kristi Chan | The Arts at CIIS