#324 Esperanto

#324 Esperanto

84x64 cm | Filler, oak frame

  • About

    Esperanto means "the one who hopes". The word MALESPERO is despair in Esperanto. Something is reassuring about expressing one's hopelessness in the language of hope. If you don't have a language to name the darkest, you will never find the light.

    Language is ideology. There is a constant power struggle over the use of language, about its limitations and possibilities. Esperanto originates from a dream to open the boundaries between people, and that language can be the key to this. We should be cautious about how the language we use shapes our understanding of reality and what powers want to exploit this.

    Even if the human subject is forever alienated from its subconscious, from the body, and from the environment, it can not exist without the desire to belong, which constantly drives it to challenge its own limitations. This is the matrix of love. The subject's existence rests on faith that there is something outside itself and hope that deliverance is possible. Although language is the instrument that established the self-conscious mind by separating it from the rest of the world, it is also the most essential tool for uniting the separate parts that constitute our reality.

  • Tablet

    To the mind, a word is always also an image. In that sense, understanding words function no different than normal perception. When we see, images are constructed inside the mind. We never perceive reality objectively or in itself. Perception is an interpretation and thus consist of language, in the same manner as understanding words.
    However, to use language, we have to speak or write it. We have to realize it. Nothing ever communicates without being inscribed into a matter of some sort. But how words are inserted into reality affects how we perceive them. Thus reality itself seeps into language. There exists no clear or unmediated communication. Matter adds to the message. Because which matter we choose to communicate through, and how we shape it, reflects on who we are, it can reveal unconscious or hidden meanings.
    Humans inscribed the first written words in stone or clay. One of the purposes was to save them for the future, to protect them from the volatility of time. To speak, or to write, is always to some extent, an act of power. The receiver must initially submit his or her attention to the message. No matter how insignificant, its meaning will always in some way change the receiver forever.


    There is a constant tension between language and reality as matter. The human subject is defined by an individual will, as opposed to the strict causality of nature. This will strive to be expressed through language. Maybe self-awareness is a result of language at use. Language as a way for the ego to invent itself, to inscribe itself into the world. It is no coincidence that many of the first examples of texts are curses, prayers, laws or inventories — different ways of trying to influence and master reality.

  • Res Ipsa



  • Studio Release

    Watch a video of me presenting this work in its premiere public appearance here.