SILVIA MAGLIONI & GRAEME THOMSON: LOST FOR WORDS

LOST FOR WORDS
(a lecture-performance by Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson
followed by a presentation of the WORD CLINIC)

In their new lecture-performance LOST FOR WORDS, artists and filmmakers Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson propose a journey through the reenchanting powers of disappearing voices and endangered languages. Drawing on both a number of recent works and their current co-research, they will seek to summon the forces of lichens, birds, knots and waves, exploring interspecies relations and forging untranslatable, fugitive alliances. The performance will be followed by a presentation of the WORD CLINIC.

LOST FOR WORDS
LOST FOR WORDS is a multi-form project initiated by artists and filmmakers Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson that confronts the violent consequences of language extinction. Languages are living organisms, each of which carries within itself an entire universe. When a language disappears, it is a world of interconnections that disappears, a whole ecosystem of knowledges, rituals, narratives, affects, lines of flight. Beginning from grassroots digital archives and co-research and drawing upon theoretical and literary texts, films, music and sound art, the project focuses on specific words or concepts that testify to forms of life that have disappeared or are endangered, while additionally focusing on areas of untranslatability, opacity, resistance, betweenness and absence. In parallel, the artists’ research maps out words and ideas whose meanings and usages are being captured, poisoned or altered and attempts to collectively imagine ways they might be healed. Adopting a transdisciplinary and decolonising approach and combining co-research with speculative fabulation, countermapping and performance, the project involves the composition of a Glossary of Re-enchantment as well as the creation of a nomadic WORD CLINIC, in the hope of fostering a co-flourishing of entangled words, ecosystems and forms of life from different cosmologies and temporalities, lost words to help us re-enchant fragments of the living web that composes our planet.

Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson are filmmakers and artists whose work explores the porous borders between fiction and documentary, the visible and the invisible, cinema and installation, theory and practice. The artists often make use of cinema to reactivate lost or forgotten archives and histories and to create new modes of collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics. Their practice includes films (both features and shorts), mixed-media installations, sound works, film-performances, radio shows and books. In constant dialogue with literature, philosophy, music and science, their projects are research-based, process-oriented and trans-disciplinary. Maglioni & Thomson’s films have been screened at major international film festivals (including Berlin Critics’ Week, IFF Rotterdam, Bafici, Jihlava, Thessaloniki and FID-Marseille). Their work has also been shown in museums and art spaces worldwide (including Centre Pompidou, Tate Britain, Reina Sofía, HKW, Serralves, MACBA, Louvre, REDCAT, The Showroom, KHOJ New Delhi, Museu de Arte Moderna de Bahia, Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, Whitechapel Gallery, LABoral, Van Abbe, CA2M, Fondazione Merz). In 2020, they co-founded the web radio firefly frequencies, which is part of the lumbung radio interlocal network (documenta fifteen). Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson are currently preparing a new film to be shot in Sicily.

The research project LOST FOR WORDS unfolds between August 2023 and July 2024 in collaboration with several international partners: EDHEA (Sierre), ESADMM (Marseille), Ecomuseo del Mare (Palermo), Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris), Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), The African Art Book Fair / Dakar Biennial (Dakar) and Fondazione Merz (Turin). It is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (12th Edition, 2023), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.