Raqs Media Collective’s public commission, ‘All, Humans’ opens 2 November 2023 at the School of Linguistics and Cultural Studies Building, Westend Campus, Goethe University, Frankfurt-am-Main.
‘All, Humans’ is a distributed video sculpture with variable pixel pitch LED, steel structures, 3D and 2D environments drawn from the Vai language syllabary, electric shamiyana patterns, and Article 1 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It builds itself from uniquely human faculty of language to construct conceptual categories that transverse the human condition. It arcs out like a canopy – suspended between a multiplicity of minds, hearts and hands, sheltering and anticipating the universal human aspiration and claim for freedom, equality and dignity. These claims are always encoded and expressed in language, but they also lie hidden in dreams. They find a hearing in conversation, they move from one speech to another in translation, at all times forming and being formed by human experience, in perpetual movement. Here, the First Article, written in the Vai language, moves through the word-structures made of LED modules – equal (téngá), spirit (zu zu), all (kpéé) human (mo kéndé) – in a joyous, whimsical and contemplative procession, igniting in equal parts bafflement and curiosity, and the invitation to know the unknown, and the untranslated.
‘All, Humans’ demands a willingness to listen to what we don’t understand, to become aware of the illegible and the unreadable, as part of living itself. It is a step that strangers can and must undertake, with each other, as they expand into the capacity of human association.
