IT WILL CANCEL OUT THE NOISE. KIMBERLY ALIDIO + JESSE CHUN

Kimberly Alidio and Jesse Chun approach the institutionalization of speech and the homogenization of language in relation to colonial dynamics, preservation and bureaucracy. Both contributions introduce opacity and untranslatability to question the ways in which languages-directly-related-to-power capture, distill and omit. / KIMBERLY ALIDIO’s contribution traces how “correct” ways of speaking are imposed and disputed through a process of erasure carried out by means of several (dis)contextualisations (economic, linguistic, symbolic or spatial) and the global-capitalist mediations of Google Docs Voice Typing, Google Translation, YouTube call center training videos, "English (Philippine)" language, and "Filipino" language. Alidio explains: In Baltimore, Maryland, USA, I was recently present for a phone call, on Speakerphone, my mother made to a customer support representative for a global company. My mom started speaking in the Filipino language and the representative answered, "I'm sorry, ma'am, we are not allowed to speak Tagalog. But where are you from in the Philippines?" I had heard a hesitation before that answer and a sort of glee in the follow-up question. / JESSE CHUN’s poems are created by erasing fragments from UNESCO’s official documents for institutionalizing Intangible Heritage. This exercise of translation questions the Eurocentric ways in which the intangible is historicized, and also points to what remains unknown and has been forgotten through non lexical abstractions and noticeable absences in the display space. The resulting poems meditate on existential provocations of time and meaning, and one's relation to their inherited lyrics.