When in Rome

In the summer of 2022, I intensively travelled across more than 10 cities in 5 countries in Europe, where the language of the next-stop announcement system has become politics.

This project was the showcase work at the Seeking for New Noise summer school at the Berlin University of Arts. In total 8 languages, namely Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, were spoken among all the participants.

The rule was simple: Follow the instructions (in different languages) when you understand, and make a compulsory guess when you don’t. In the first session where people started in a straight line,  ‘left’ and ‘right’ were given. In the second session, where people started in a circle, ‘forward’, ‘backward’, ‘up’ and ‘down’ were given. All eyes blanked out.