Referring to Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of ‘wild tongue’ (Borderlands, 1987), the exhibition departs from the questions: How to tame a wild tongue? How to carry a language? The verbs ‘taming’ and ‘carrying’ imply certain dynamics of permission and restriction of movement, and suggest the entanglement between language and the body.

Through sculptural and audio elements, the exhibition explores the power of language and its poetics. It delves into the notion of ‘tongue’ as an archive: the tongue as a muscle shaped by the physical practice of moving/ talking, the tongue as a personal collection of the words that each of us speaks, the tongue as a ‘cultured’ part of the body. It explores the practices of accent reduction and speech therapy, tools widely used when ‘working on language’. It addresses accent as part of our linguistic identity, but also something that defines access or restriction. It examines the weight of different accents, their stigma, and what the process of adaptation to a new language can generate in a body.

Installation and production: Valge Kuup
Sound design: Michael McCrea
Graphic design: Kersti Heile
Photos: Hedi Jaansoo