LINGUA VARIA / Susanne Kass (FIN)

Around the world about half of the approximately 7000 known languages are a generation or two from disappearing. As the world becomes more globalised and a few major languages continue to colonize communication, how can we grasp these facts emotionally?

The performance addresses individual and collective language relationships and histories, passed down from family and the various surroundings we are in contact with throughout our lives. Through exploring the characteristics of how language is learnt and used we can also uncover the characteristics of our own personál ways of speaking.

As language diversity is a basic building block of cultural diversity, all cultures and even sub-cultures define themselves to a large extent though their use and development of language. How has the emotional power which language produces affected the course of history and does this have some relationship to the precarious situation of minority languages today? What will really be lost when a language ceases to be spoken?

Susanne Kass
is a visual artist based in Prague working with new media and performance in an attempt to explore aspects of communication and our understanding of modes of transfer across time and space. Her mother tongue is a dialect of Swedish spoken in Österbothnia in Finland.