The Interstice

Words by: Ksenija Carleton

Illustration by: Kelly Roach

“[…] Only my words bear me, a bird born from me who builds a nest in my ruins before me, and in the rubble of the enchanting world around me. I stood on the wind, and my long night was without end. This is my language, a necklace of stars around the necks of my loved ones.” Mahmoud Darwish, A Rhyme for the Odes (Mu’allaqat), 2008.

At this year’s Venice Biennale – one of the contemporary art world’s most visited and talked about affairs, the words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish received homage. Indeed, as part of the Washwasha exhibit hosted at the United Arab Emirates pavilion, Syrian-Palestinian artist Mays Albaik borrowed a line from Darwish’s A Rhyme to the Odes for the title her sculpture-installation: “kūnī kay akūna kamā aqūl!” (“Be, so I may become what I say.”).

“Kūnī kay akūna kamā aqūl!” is comprised of nineteen mouth blown-pieces of glass, nine of which sit atop a large rectangular pedestal (or box really) made of black wood. The remaining ten are suspended from the ceiling, hanging off black strings of rope which hide little LED lights so that the glass sculptures glow white, and appear as though floating in the air. Each glass sculpture is tiny (about the length of a thumb), completely asymmetrical and composed of jagged sides. As a result, the installation looks something like a reflecting pool of nineteen crystal-type objects, all hovering over a black void.

Crystals however, they are not. In fact, these small pieces of uneven glass are molds of the inside of the artist’s mouth. Those that are suspended represent the precise position Albaik’s mouth was in as she – tried to – speak the Qur’anic verse kun fa yakun (be and it is), while those on the pedestal capture her attempts at saying the phrase ana lughati (I am my language). Ironically of course, the casting alginate that Albaik had to line her mouth with in order to create the molds, upended her ability to speak or form the words coherently at all. Thus, the glass molds ultimately give shape to language in germ, to that essential arena of meaning where language comes into being.

Darwish’s A Rhyme for the Odes, to which the work’s title makes reference, is a meditation on this very interaction: the recursive relationship between language and being, and how both are inextricably linked. The poem is comprised of twenty one-to-two line verses, with a line skipped in between each. These spaces, like breaths in a sentence, play both a structural and expressive role in the poem as they do in speech. Darwish reminds us here that there is no language without the moments of pause that constitute its absence, that there is no word without the non-words that encompass it.

We are all intuitively aware of this interplay between words and silences. A word or phrase becomes legible (both literally and metaphorically) when it is delineated by non-worded space. Yet, Albaik’s work reminds us that this is not a binary, that words are not formed against non-words but with them. This idea stems from the philosophical writings of Vilém Flusser, who argued that word formation takes place “before [words] are public, but after they become words”. Put simply, the word comes to be in the interstice between abstract thought and the uttering of sound. This wordless Interstice is therefore not the opposite of meaning, but its center: the generative pool from which all meaning emerges. Thus, the Interstice is language in its purest form – a concept that “kūnī kay akūna kamā aqūl!” (literally) objectifies.

Yet, what then is silence, and how does it differ from the Interstice? I would argue that silence is politically distinct from both the Interstice, and Silence (capital S). While we can understand silence to be synonymous with the Interstice (the non-worded space between abstraction and form in which language is constructed; the organic process of forming meaning practiced by all of us), Silence is a coercive instrument utilized by the nation-state to deprive the marginalized of their meaning-making autonomy, and thus maintain the ideological status-quo (of white supremacy, imperialism, and greed) that serves those in power.

Indeed, it is significant that these themes of meaning-making and language are being explored by artists of Palestinian origin, whose existence and identity have been shaped by an unrelenting effort by colonialist nation-states profiting from racial capitalism (Israel, the majority of EU members, and of course the United States), to Silence them. The history of Palestine is one that perfectly exemplifies this dichotomy between Silence and the Interstice. Palestinian voices are those from whom the Interstice (the autonomy to create new meaning) has been robbed, since indigenous Palestinian meaning would necessarily entail Palestinian sovereignty – a threat to the racial capitalist order of the Western hegemon.

In our current epoch of polycrisis, discussing the politics of Silence and meaning-making, of who gets to imagine and decide what the world looks like versus who doesn’t, feels especially urgent. To be alive today is to bear witness to the crumbling of our institutions and their progressive façades, which hitherto masked the racial violence and deep inequality upon which they were built and were thus always destined to perpetuate. At the same time, the technological epidemic that is AI and the pressuring of billionaire-technocrats to relegate our capacities for literal word formation and meaning-making to a for-profit software, appears as yet another effort to Silence; an attempt to whittle away our capacities of imagining another system of meaning, and another kind of world.

At the same time however, this effort to deplete our imaginative capabilities is also a reminder of the revolutionary nature of meaning-making, language being the most fundamental of these systems of world-building. Through this moment of prolonged chaos, and what feels like a jungle of indecipherable noise accompanied by intense Silencing, we can be reminded that a special space still exists, one from which all language – and thus all possibilities to imagine something new – emerge, and to which we all have access: this space I call the Interstice.