AN EXERCISE FOR UNIVERSAL CONVERSATION 1,2,
Ahram Chae

Documentation of workshop series, HD video, Audio

Three international speakers with different backgrounds and languages are invited to an experimental workshop. In this workshop, the participants are asked to have ‘a talk’ with each other in their own mother tongues while believing that they really can understand each other’s words. Out of the clay on the table, they can make signs for better communication. In the documentation videos, the faint English subtitles repeatedly appear and disappear.

Inevitably, people in modern society have a universal language for effective communication, which always causes imbalanced power structures in international groups. This workshop aims to make an idealistic international conversation where no one is unheard; while having a condition to share the same amount of success and failure in the communication, at least no one in the group fails to exist as who they are. And in the crossing of juxtaposed words, rather it gets clearer what enables the conversation to keep going.

Participant Group 1: Asha Lester(Chinese), Elham Asadpour(Persian), Lucia Diego(Spanish) , Group 2: Amadeus Kraemer(German), Minhee Ahn(Korean), Adhika Ferdinand(Hindi), Assistant: Kunwoo Ro