“All the body parts used for language – the lips, neck/throat, nose, teeth, ears – are erogenous, sensuous, throbbing organs, receiving or giving pleasure. In order to escape the cold, clinical approach to linguistics and the hard hangover of language politics, we decided to seek warmth and refuge in the darker, carnal, or even cartilaginous, corners of language: more sybaritic than semantic.
We first tried to redress this imbalance with Khhhhhhh, a publication which passed over the tongue and the mouth in general, to see in the throat a phonetic source of sacred agency, be it in the Arabic Abjad, Hebrew Gematria, or Russian Futurism à la Khlebnikov. This time around, we indulge the proboscis and find in the nose a particular site of resistance in the Slavic and Turkic languages. The drive to Cyrillicize Polish hit rather steep speed bumps in the shape of the nasal vowels ą and ę. If Slavic languages ever had nasal sounds, most have since been lost, save for those in Polish and some instances of Bulgarian. […]”
Excerpt from the publication
Naughty Nasals (English/Polish), 2014, offset print, 31 × 23 cm, 80 pages, black and white and colour throughout, glue binding, gloss-laminated softcover. Published by Arsenal Gallery, Białystok. ISBN 9788389778536
