A Foreign Tongue

Imagine speaking with somebody else’s tongue in your mouth. A Foreign Tongue is a poetic essay on cultural othering and a migrant's experience. It is also an archive appropriation and an investigation into how we read neighboring images and how they can be affected by words.

The publication reflects the complex power dynamics between aliens and natives. Throughout the spreads of the book, images are paired with a recurrent verse structure to illustrate aspects of fear, curiosity, sexualization, imperialism, estrangement, and empathy. Playing with the ambivalence of the terms, cultural clichés are presented through actual clichés plates, bridging the context of the early printing press technologies to our current ordinary speech.

The term cliché was adopted as printers’ jargon to refer to a stereotype, electrotype, cast plate, or block print that could reproduce type or images repeatedly. Later, clichés became expressions, ideas, or elements of an artistic work that have become overused to the point of losing their original meaning or effect. Typically pejorative, clichés may or may not be true. Some are stereotypes, but some are simply truisms and facts.