Veiling syllables on the written floor

In public spaces filled with multiple languages, understanding often becomes a privilege. This project explores language as an invisible infrastructure that structures access, belonging, and exclusion. In multilingual environments, languages coexist yet rarely communicate; each listener perceives fragments corresponding to their own linguistic code, while other voices dissolve into background noise. These selective perceptions reveal how a physically shared space is layered into invisible borders and reorganised into overlapping personal territories.

The festival site functions as a space of transit where movements and languages intersect temporarily. Within this urban heterotopia, Yedam Ann proposes a temporary public square for reading, writing, and speaking—a site where multiple languages are allowed to accumulate, disperse, and recombine.

Through periodic readings of her own texts, which act as atmospheric impulses rather than focal points, the artist addresses experiences of exclusion, erased voices, and linguistic fragmentation. Throughout the performance, the audience is invited to write freely: words, sentences, or fragments flow onto paper distributed across the ground. Writing is anonymous, deliberately destabilising authorship and narrative coherence. Participants may respond to existing texts, introduce unrelated linguistic traces, or engage in collective weaving of words.

The written materials are then physically altered—torn, rearranged, (mis)translated, or left untranslated. Languages and meanings bleed into one another or collide without resolution, forming a spatial installation of flowing speech. This project invites us to reclaim agency through the collective act of un-learning and re-writing the space we share.