FORUM+ - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2022

Ahilan Ratnamohan deconstructs his experience learning the Tamil script, examining the personal experience and the typographical construction of the letters parallel to each other. He uses a sort of auto-fiction to investigate the incremental steps involved in learning a new script and asks the reader to dive into the experience with him, by gradually introducing Tamil characters into the text and consequently imprinting them in the head of the reader. He attempts to address the work involved in this and draws comparisons with his own artistic and learning labour.

ENSEMBLE: An Architecture of the Inbetween is the book by architect and artist Shervin/Sheikh Rezaei published at the end of 2020. It is the result of her first solo trip to her home country Iran, which she undertook in the winter of 2018. Sheikh Rezaei writes about the two cultures between which she moves, the Middle Eastern (Iranian) and the Western (Belgian), and the in-between feeling she experienced during her trip. In her research, she searched for a polyphonic place, an architectural ensemble that unites both cultures. She does this in two languages: Farsi and English. In a conversation with Ine Engels, she discusses the creation of this bilingual publication.

Multi Scripts – Blended Type Family Stories is a collective research-in-progress about multi-script typography. Partial and situated rather than universalist, it aims to be reflective, critical, speculative, and rich in proposals. It uses decolonial and feminist tools, it centres on diasporic experiences, pays attention to personal, professional, and family stories and anecdotes, to bring a contemporary reflection on multi-script typographic creation today.

Despite increasing internationalization, to date there has been little research into the language use of students in performing arts education at tertiary level. This article outlines a framework for academic and professional language skills in music and dance, intended for use by students, staff, and managers to streamline language support in the context of increasing competition and precarity faced by music and dance graduates.

Sint Lucas Antwerp and De Connectie (Fameus) share their experiences about participatory creation with a multilingual group of students and artistic newcomers. Attention will be paid to non-western art forms, multiple languages and their writing systems. The message of the linguistic artistic creations in the (semi-) public space is always an invitation to welcome the other and the otherness. This text, too, is an invitation: to abandon hierarchies, to put aside cramped language, to broaden the artistic canon.