Spoken Worlds

Introduction: Language Matters are Political and Social Matters

Cropped section of mindmap by Spoken Worlds co-curators

The Spoken Worlds project was co-curated by Moritz Cheung, Roxana Gibescu, Basil Olton, June Yuen Ting (all ECG 2022) and Marta Marsicka (ECG 2021), and funded through BAN’s Collaborative Project opportunity for Emerging Curators Group members. As a group of curators with lived experience of migration and diaspora, we are interested in the relationship between bilingualism, translation, communication, and artistic practice. The research enabled us to understand what is lost and gained when switching between languages in the creative process.

In the last decades, the number of diaspora artists and curators settling in Britain has risen, confirming migration as one of the most important contemporary phenomena of our times. With the Spoken Worlds film and manifesto, we wanted to establish an understanding of working with diasporic identities, languages, politics and ideas, which can inspire and benefit the sector by raising awareness on the significance and accuracy of foreign language use in curating British art.

The manifesto outlines our ambitions and goals towards the inclusion of immigrant artists. We see this project as setting an ethical framework for collecting and showing diaspora and immigrant art on an institutional level. It also includes a helpful dictionary that explains the meaning of immigration-related terms, such as micro-history, microaggression, and xenoracism.