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“In France, we say ‘an angel passes by;’ in Spain, ‘a Bishop is born;’ in Portugal, ‘a poet is dead.’ I’m glad that I could place a long silence in one of my films.”
– Raoul Ruiz
Definition
In French, the expression “téléphone arabe” has two meanings: 1) An oral communication and, furthermore, a rumor or unreliable information; 2) A kid’s game which consists of whispering a word to one another in a circle: the first person whispers a phrase in the ear of the second, the second tells the heard phrase to the third, and so on until the last player says it out loud, usually giving way to a collective frenzy due to the – voluntary or involuntary – deformations the initial phrase has undergone through its multiple repetitions.
Hiatus
One day, I noticed that the word “telephone” written in Arabic created a semantic short-circuit with the French expression “téléphone arabe” (Figure 1):
Indeed, the word “telephone” written in Arabic is particularly Arabic only for the non-Arabic speaking person; someone who speaks Arabic will only read the word “telephone” since the Arabic connotation will naturally not be perceptible (Figure 2). This linguistic fact is not a theoretical construct open to speculative arabesques. I found it just as it was, like one finds a mushroom, one of these irreducible organisms that thrive in the dark corners of language and resist translation through their shady existence.
To share this curious finding, I decided to make a word-object out of it, a neon sign that I installed in a public space. Neon, of course, is a classical medium of conceptual art – one thinks of Joseph Kosuth’s tautological neon piece titled A Four Colour Sentence (1965-1967), or Bruce Nauman’s visual puns like none sing/neon sign (1970), for instance. I thought it was funny to make a hybrid object within this tradition but install it in a more anonymous public space instead of in the institutional frame of a museum; to set it somewhere it could generate cultural jamming instead of within a white cube where it would have more likely received a proper reading. Moreover, the hegemonic language of the art world – the language through which the type of conceptual...