For the second part of Unit 03, I’m interested in going beyond the technicalities of learning a language and exploring its narrative qualities. One of the reasons I worked with Urdu in the first place is because I have this insecurity surrounding my lack of fluency in it, and thought it might be interesting to look at the root of that.
At the moment, the emerging enquiry is somewhere along the lines of:
How can language be experienced, rather than simply read, through its materialisation?
How can physical artefacts be a framework for expanding the limitations of language?
The idea is to abstract language into different formats, while working within the limitations of my own knowledge.
The proposal:
The work revolves around the notion of an ‘archetypal taxi ride’ — an experience which I consider to be both intimate and performative, being a rare opportunity for me to speak Urdu while living in the west. It’s a scenario in which language both serves as a tool of recognition (the driver and I both being Pakistani) but also a barrier given our varying degrees of proficiency in Urdu, which typically results in the performance of a structured dialogue.
Through documenting these limitations of my dialogue and abstracting the performance of the taxi conversation into visual and aural artefacts, the projects considers the possibility of creating a new kind of ‘fluency’ that is not solely defined by proficiency in speech, but one that could be constructed (and made accessible to non-Urdu speakers) through the consideration of language as a material.
In my experience, the taxi rides I’ve shared with Pakistani drivers can be distilled into the following structure:
1
(opening) formalities
2
recognition
3
context
4
pakistan
5
(closing) formalities
I intend to flesh out a dialogue based on this structure and envision the work taking form as a series of interrelated parts, illustrated in the diagram above.