Babel - the theme

Well, the residency is done. Time for some reflection.

I never really took the theme of this residency that seriously. I mean, every artist involved works with text, but beyond that, the question what exactly we were there for never came up. Which was fine. I learned alot, made new friends and created a lot of new work.

There were some "Babel-like" commonalities. Billy Mavreas introduced us to the term "asemic writing", which was found in most people's work at some point and in other's more so: Sylvia Ptak's thread-pulls, Ernie Kroeger's beetle drawings, Adrianna Riquer Turner's wall mark tracings, perhaps even Ken Singer's new "landscapes," and Rachelle Viader Knowles text fragments, which appear also in this month's YYZine.

So Babel, the confusion of languages was one possible thread.
Babble was perhaps another, different thread.
Rabble yet another.
More about these later.

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