Abstract What happens when participants in an academic context are invited to speak in their mother tongues, even when no one else understands them? Departing from a critique of English hegemony in international conference settings, in this 90-minute laboratory participants are invited to resist the pressure of universal translatability and instead inhabit the particular sonic, rhythmic, and conceptual textures of their own native languages.
The practice draws on a series of workshops in which specific grammatical features of participants’ languages (for example, the different ways languages express temporal relations) function as operative principles shaping a shared musical and conversational event. Grammar is not treated as a neutral container for meaning but as a generative force: a set of constraints and affordances that conditions how we think, listen, and relate to one another.
The laboratory engages three productive tensions. First, between the desire to be understood and the musical qualities of speech (intonation, stress, rhythm) which remain communicative even when semantic content is opaque. Second, between the individual mother tongue as an irreducible epistemic resource and the collective space of a multilingual encounter. Third, between misunderstanding as failure and misunderstanding as opening — a site where new forms of meaning and new modes of listening can emerge.
The laboratory emerges from my artistic research as a singer and improviser on the relationship between song and speech, and on how their interplay shapes processes of meaning-making in collective vocal practices.
By privileging mother tongues over a shared lingua franca, the workshop enacts rather than merely discusses the conference’s concern with minoritised language and the interplay of power and language.